Some sharpness comparisons for popular RAW converters for EOS M
7 months ago
4
Warning: this post involves pixel peeping and nerding out about RAW conversion tools. Reader beware!
Today I took a picture of my daughter and decided to do some comparisons of sharpness with various RAW converters that have at least some degree of popularity on this forum. The photo was taken with my Sigma 30mm f/1.4 at f/2.0, and it was a candid, uncontrolled shot. However, the eyelashes are in sharp focus, so I still think it makes for an interesting comparison. Unfortunately, DPP4 doesn't have DLO profiles for this lens. Here are the converters I tried:
- Straight OOC JPEG. I think I used the portrait style for this one.
- DPP4, standard profile
- Darktable
- ART (basically RawTherapee with some changes, but the sharpening should be the same, so you can think of this as RawTherapee)
- DxO Photolab 5
All conversions were done with default settings. I know there is endless room to tweak knobs and get different results, but I'm also wary of pushing up that sharpening slider. Anyway, here are 100% crops:
OOC JPEG
DPP4
Darktable
ART/RawTherapee
DxO Photolab 5
To me ART/RawTherapee and DxO are definitely a cut above the rest. It's easiest to see in the eyelashes. The first three all use an unsharp mask. ART/RawTherapee uses a method called RL Deconvolution by default, and DxO has its proprietary lens corrections. DxO may be ever so slightly sharper than ART, but it's hard to say. In any case, I'm really impressed with how well the sharpening algorithm does in ART without resorting to measuring individual lens sharpness characteristics like DxO and DLO in DPP4. And while the benefits over an unsharp mask may be subtle in this picture since only the eyes are in sharp focus, it is noticeable to me at normal viewing sizes in some other pictures.
If I can get the remote camera control in the Canon Camera Connect app working tomorrow, I'll repeat this test in more controlled conditions with a Canon lens so that I can include DLO in the comparison. I will also include full size images.