ON1 Photo Raw vs Lightroom vs Capture 1 PRO 10 - conversion quality

AdCr said:

I was interested in how do these programs cope with difficult scenes, not some perfectly exposed daylight portrait where anything will do but stuff that's heavily over/under exposed or noisy or with strong backlight etc.

So - how do they handle overexposed photo ? This is scene severely overexposed with flash. How much details can we recover ? All that I used was Exposure and Highlights sliders. Everything else is "as shot" including white balance.

Results:

I think LR wins, followed by C1 and ON1 being laughable. Details in hair of a girl and skin texture of an adult are significantly better in LR conversion. ON1 is a joke - hand is completely destroyed, a lot less details in girl's face, weird green colour shift. The reason why the white point is a bit darker on ON1 photo is that I tried to recover more details while seeing how poorly it's behaving.

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AdCr said:

So to follow it with a extreme shadow test, that is a photo (100% crop) of a black dog underexposed by about 4 stops. I used Exposure, Shadows and Noise Reduction sliders in all 3 programs. Rest is untouched. That's how the photo looks like without touching it at all:

And what I could achieve with RAW converters:

So to get it out of the way - ON1 is laughing stock again.

As to C1 vs LR it's kind of hard for me to decide. LR did weird colour shift this time, black fur goes into magenta. C1 colours look far better. Noise reduction is a tough one - I don't like the fact that with LR I couldn't get rid of big white pixels on the dog without going crazy on luminance which makes it big smudgy blob. On the other hand if you look at C1 noise reduction around the dog it looks bad. So, I think I have to give C1 a slight edge against LR this time - mainly because it handled colours much better.

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naththo said:

I agreed C1 done great job with the colour it seems for shadow recovery by not bringing up too much magenta/green. I have C1 free for Sony and this works really well for Sony image vs LR.

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AdCr said:

I was interested in how do these programs cope with difficult scenes, not some perfectly exposed daylight portrait where anything will do but stuff that's heavily over/under exposed or noisy or with strong backlight etc.

So - how do they handle overexposed photo ? This is scene severely overexposed with flash. How much details can we recover ? All that I used was Exposure and Highlights sliders. Everything else is "as shot" including white balance.

Results:

I think LR wins, followed by C1 and ON1 being laughable. Details in hair of a girl and skin texture of an adult are significantly better in LR conversion. ON1 is a joke - hand is completely destroyed, a lot less details in girl's face, weird green colour shift. The reason why the white point is a bit darker on ON1 photo is that I tried to recover more details while seeing how poorly it's behaving.

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yanisha said:

AdCr said:

I was interested in how do these programs cope with difficult scenes, not some perfectly exposed daylight portrait where anything will do but stuff that's heavily over/under exposed or noisy or with strong backlight etc.

So - how do they handle overexposed photo ? This is scene severely overexposed with flash. How much details can we recover ? All that I used was Exposure and Highlights sliders. Everything else is "as shot" including white balance.

Results:

I think LR wins, followed by C1 and ON1 being laughable. Details in hair of a girl and skin texture of an adult are significantly better in LR conversion. ON1 is a joke - hand is completely destroyed, a lot less details in girl's face, weird green colour shift. The reason why the white point is a bit darker on ON1 photo is that I tried to recover more details while seeing how poorly it's behaving.

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LR: left photo

C1: middle photo

ON1: right photo

?????

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s_grins said:

I believe everything depends on your acquaintance with program.

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s_grins said:

IMHO, the only way to save this pathetic photo is to make it B/W, regardless of converter.

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AdCr said:

s_grins said:

I believe everything depends on your acquaintance with program.

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Please talk specifics what should I do in ON1 to recover those highlights in my first example or improve shadows in second so it roughly matches LR or C1. I will be happy to try it and post results.

I do not claim that ON1 can't deal with normal, easy to process photographs but I would like to use it to gain advantage from that RAW file like increased dynamic range. So I want to boost those shadows or have some more details in the clouds - that's one of the reasons why I'm shooting RAW, otherwise I wouldn't bother and shoot JPG.

AdCr said:

IMHO, the only way to save this pathetic photo is to make it B/W, regardless of converter.

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This is photo taken during setting up the flash, test photo like "back of the hand" to see what's going on - it doesn't have to be saved.

The reason it's used is because there are very clear overexposed areas where is 0 data and it will not be recovered even by LR 2025 or C1 PRO 20. So in between what's visible and what's definitely destroyed is a "grey area" that shows us capabilities of each program to recover as much as it can.

If I used photo like you have used, I would test nothing. Yep, properly exposed yellow flower that will look fine in every single RAW converter under the sun. You can take this photo and process it with anything as a proof of "yeah program is fine, maybe others lack my skill"

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Dale Garman said:

I'm not quite clear on the point of this post. It appears the WB has significant problems (not clear if a mostly yellow or greenish yellow). So is this to be a successful example or an unsuccessful example of RAW conversion?

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