RAW Converter Comparison / Challenge

Tim van der Leeuw wrote:

Setting the Scene

With the New Years celebrations I shot some nice photos of the fireworks and wanted to share some of them.

One of them needed a bit of straightening and perhaps cropping before sharing -- so I opened the RAW file in RAW Power (which uses Apples RAW converter that used to power Aperture).

I always shoot RAW + JPEG so I knew what the file should look like out-of-camera ... and I was unpleasantly surprised with the initial results of RAW conversion.

So I set out to compare different RAW converters in earnest. Most of them I had already toyed around with earlier, but not as serious as now. Now I had a file that could really show some weaknesses...

RawTherapee

I saved this one for the last. It's the first tool I tried after RAWPower disappointed me, and RawTherapee disappointed me even more. What should have been there amongst the best (according to various threads I've read in the past), was the worst: 3-pass Markesteijn demosaicing, in RawTherapee.

I tried all the different demosaicing engines, and found 1-pass (fast) to produce least unacceptable results.

Using 3-pass Markesteijn demosaicing. What the actual freak happened there?

1-pass fast. Looks better, still a lot of colour fringing.

So. There you have it.

My full comparison of RAW conversion tools for Fuji X-Trans cameras.

Here is my quick attempt with RawTherapee. I used 3-pass + fast demosaic, and capture sharpening. To get rid of the fringing, I used false color suppression, noise reduction, and defringe. White balance via the dropper on some of the fireworks.

PP3 via Google Drive