RAW Converter Comparison / Challenge

William Loney wrote:

Interestingly enough, I have just finished doing some testing myself. A couple of my observations are fairly similar to yours, even though I chose a different method.

I didn't want to jack your thread, so I didn't post my images. I could, if you want.

I don't mind if you add your images to this thread as well!

I used Capture 1, ACDSee, X RAW Studio, and Affinity.

What I did differently, was I intentionally underexposed my test raw by a full stop so that I had a controlled example of being able to push my conversions one stop each. Other than that, I just added sharpening. No white balance adjustments; no highlight/shadow adjustments, etc.

To me, this gave me a better base for just RAW conversions, as opposed to conversion+ adjustments. I figured that any adjustments beyond what I did would be up to the users taste.

I didn't shoot these images with the purpose of testing RAW converters -- but it proved a very good test-bed for them. A lot of detail and sharp lines. Some tools really messed that up, more than I had expected.

My results?

Capture 1 and X RAW Studio were almost identical. ACDSee seemed a little 'flat,' compared to the first two, and Affinity was a little more saturated.

As far as I'm concerned, with a little effort, all could be made to appear almost identical with a little tweaking -but as I said, this would be editing, and not just converting.

Interesting observations!

I could not get acceptable results out of ACDSee, nor out of RawTherapee (although I had previously tried them with different images and they performed OK on those easier images).

So I wouldn't say that they all can be made to appear almost  identical!

BTW I mostly didn't do any editing either, looking mostly at just RAW file as it was opened, but when the converter clearly screwed up I tried to see if I could fix the file by enabling or disabling lens corrections etc.