Winterfrost
Senior Member
At which settings? Just a screenie is for horses - no offence. Did you set the slider all to the right, optical quality at max, also CA removal?Well I finally had time to try this out. My hope was that it might help the corners on otherwise quality lenses. My first goal was to help the corners on the 12-40/2.8 when shot using pixel shift high res on an E-M5II. This did not work at all, the piccure+ output following all their recommendations and trying around ten different processing variations always lost significant detail compared to just processing in Lightroom.
I worried that maybe pixel shift was the issue or too large an input file was making piccure+ unhappy. So I tried it with a bog standard 16MP input, again following all piccure+ recommendations and trying multiple variations in processing parameters. Same result, the piccure+ results no matter what I tried resulted in lost detail compared to Lightroom only processing.
Now the 12-40 is a very good lens, and while piccure+ claims it helps even nice lenses I thought it would be most fair to give it a somewhat less quality lens since that is what they primarily advertise. So I processed a shot with a 14-45/3.5-5.6 kit lens which has corners that certainly go a bit soft even stopped down a bit. This was also shot with a different camera (GH2 instead of E-M5II) in case there was some weird issue with E-M5II files. Once again, the same result - piccure+ losing detail compared with basic Lightroom processing.
I submitted a ticket over a week ago, no response.
I also went back and looked at the various reviews and samples posted. Well, almost all of them compare piccure+ output to entirely unsharpened input. That's a ridiculous comparison of course. Furthermore the ones that do compare with a sharpened file usually compare with bog standard USM sharpening which is ridiculously weak tea.
My comparisons have been done with actually useful and intelligently selected LR settings. Namely adjusting the "Detail" slider higher as this engages some basic deconvolution sharpening with LR/ACR itself. My particular settings are usually around Amount 40, Radius 0.8, Detail 80, Masking 30 with a Luminance NR of 10. My input to piccure+ is with zero sharpening or NR from LR since that is what they specifically recommend (though I do allow LR to do CA correction, again their recommendation).
I've tried multiple piccure+ settings, most at Quality+ with a wide range of Aberrations and Rendering settings. The end results are always the same, piccure+ loses detail compared to just straight LR processing. All tests done with Denoise disabled in piccure+ (though I tested once with it turned on at a low setting just to confirm nothing funny was going on).
The most distressing thing it piccure+ fails the "processing Hippocratic oath" - first do no harm. It doesn't help corner softness any more than LR/ACR and at the same time destroys detail in the aberration free central part of the image.
Anyway, this seemed a really neat concept. I've seen advanced deconvolution at work and it can do a good job. But at least from all my test with their most recent software this takes ages and ages to process while doing a worse job than an extremely simplified deconvolution approach (such as LR/ACR or DxO would apply).
Representative sample below, piccure+ on the left and LR/ACR only on the right (enlarge to 100% viewing of course):
piccure+ on left, LR only on right, Panasonic 14-45/3.5-5.6 on GH2, crop from lower right corner.
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Ken W
See profile for equipment list
I tried the trial weeks ago, and it really made a difference - not like into your sample & text, which just looks like a rant. nothing bad meant.
I can't speak for LR - because i really dislikeLR, can't stand the GUI, and it's slow as molasses behaviour, and this silly "catalogue everything" feature drives me crazy. And i stand my ground by this. Thanks god, people do have a choice - and post processing & RAW image converting isn't -just- LR.
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"The Best Camera is the One That's with You" ~ Chase Jarvis
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But maybe if it isn't too much trouble you could grab most any appropriate image and run it quickly through Piccure+ and upload the input and output. That would at least let me check if my version is acting differently than yours.
I don't use/have CC 2015.x, because i am on the CS6 Bandwaggon - and still happy with it. About lens profiles, and especially CA Correction: It's just an approximation, because if you know lenses good, you'll know the term: Sample Variation, and no lens is 100% exactly as the other...so usually a typical lens profile is matching, correlating to the specific lens, but if one would test 10 lenses, one would have 10 (slightly) different lenses, in terms of sharpness, MTF, corner performance, CA, etc.
