Silkypix Raw File Converter settings

I used Lightroom for developing my XA1 and XT10 images for the last 2 years. I own Irident Developer for a year now and now I tied the free Raw File Converter (Silkypix) and are very satisfied with the results. They are so good that I plan to switch my workflow to Raw File Converter.

Sharpening

Sharpening is up there with Irident Developer. Depending on texture you have the impression to get more detail out of it than with ID. I tried and checked and that are my default settings:

• There are 2 sharpening modes in Raw Developer. Manual
• Type normal sharp produces very sharp results that can look clear and oversharpened very easily.
• ISO100 Outline emphasis 14, Detail emphasis 100
• ISO800 Outline emphasis 20, Detail emphasis 100
• ISO1600 Outline emphasis 17, Detail emphasis 100
• ISO3200 Outline emphasis 14, Detail emphasis 100
• ISO6400 Outline emphasis 14, Detail emphasis 100
• Type pure detail gets you closer to Irident Developer in the matter of sharpness because it is more sophisticated.
• ISO100 Outline emphasis 37, Detail emphasis 48
• ISO800 Outline emphasis 37, Detail emphasis 48
• ISO1600 Outline emphasis 37, Detail emphasis 48
• ISO3200 Outline emphasis 37, Detail emphasis 48
• ISO6400 Outline emphasis 40, Detail emphasis 48

Noise reduction

For noise I could not get Silkypix to work that flawless as ID and LR. The results are ok but here I need help. (I think about using Lightrooms noise reduction with the output of SP).

My settings so far. Manual

• ISO100 Color distortion 0, Noise reduction 0, Noise Level 0, Noise cancel 38
• ISO800 Color distortion 11, Noise reduction 5, Noise Level 0, Noise cancel 38
• ISO1600 Color distortion 15, Noise reduction 15, Noise Level 0, Noise cancel 38
• ISO3200 Color distortion 18, Noise reduction 10, Noise Level 0, Noise cancel 38
• ISO6400 Color distortion 25, Noise reduction 38, Noise Level 0, Noise cancel 38

Since I could not find any current settings for Silkypix / Raw File Converter I thought I should publish my own settings. And maybe someone has some additional advice to get more out of it?

To get maximum detail the most important thing is to go to the Noise tab and change from "High Resolution" to "High Speed". This reduces smearing of detail which happens even when all NR sliders are at zero. It is just not so effective in noise reduction when needed.

Then in Development I usually keep the slider at its default setting.

In Sharpness the finest look is usually Pure detail combined with something like 60-80 on outline and 10-20 on detail.

It is a bit laborious because I don't know a way to make these settings load as default. In RawTherapee I saved a profile and set it as a default for opening new images, instant sharpness/microcontrast pop.

Thank you for the input. I tested the mentioned tipps and found it very usefull.

I tried to better match high ISO sharpening Vs. noise reduction. OOC colors where another point that I checked. And I got some surprising conclusions.

Reduce demosaic sharpness to zero! The presharpening will work out like Clarity slider in Lightroom. It enhances clear edges BUT it changes the image colors drastically. It reduces the vivid suptle colors and makes them more uniform, muted and harsh.

To get better Fuji OOC colors with RAW file converter EX2, you have to dial down the demosaic sharpness to 0 (Manual ) and a slight push of contrast gets you a little more pop.

I tried to match the output of Irident Developer but that is difficult. ID is that good. There are textures that EX2 will handle better (pink, slight red cloth that is clipping easily with other RAW converters) but ID has a very good compromise between sharpening and noise reduction. I can offer samples if you guys want.

Following settings is my new attempt to ballance out noise and sharpness with high ISO images (ISO2500 - 6400)

Sharpening

• Demosaic sharpness 0
• Outline emphasis 75, Detail emphasis 20, Type Pure Detail

Noise Reduction

• Color distortion 25, Noise reduction 0, Noise Level 0, Noise cancel 0

Advent1sam wrote:

Like you fuji ex2 even surpasses the paid for sp versions and if correctly integrated is so easy to use.

You keep saying that without any proof. I've used both a lot and don't see that when using the same "Normal Sharpening" in both, they produce identical amount of detail.  I've posted my results.  Please provide some proof of EX2's superiority. Yes, it's free, but DS7 provides a lot more options for editing, which is what I paid for (on a good sale) on top of EX2. I also use RawTherapee and PhotoNinja, and all have their pros and cons.

Just for sience I compared the OOC, Lightroom, Irident Developer and EX2 images. Here we go.

All images got the same treatment: +0.7EV, Astia profile.

LR: color noise reduction 15, sharpness detail 100, mask 10

Irident Developer: color noise 6, luma noise 3, sharpness reveal

EX2: my latest settings for sharpness and noise reduction

ISO3200, left top ID, left bottom OOC, right top LR, right bottom EX2

ISO1600 left top ID, left bottom EX2, right top LR, right bottom OOC

The difference with the wood of the seat is very interesting.

ISO2500  left top ID, left bottom OOC, right top LR, right bottom EX2

ISO5000 left top ID, left bottom EX2, right top LR, right bottom OOC

ISO200 left top ID, left bottom EX2, right top LR, right bottom OOC

ISO200 left top ID, left bottom EX2, right top LR, right bottom OOC

This one is interesting because of the dark shadow part of the jeans. You can see that LR crushes the blacks and the film simulation of ID posterizes the dark parts so that both loose shadow detail here. You can see that the yellow strings are not yellow  with LR and OOC anymore too.

ISO200 left top ID, left bottom EX2, right top LR, right bottom OOC

Another interesting one is the handling of red cloth. No the EX2 example is not noisy it is showing cloth detail that the others wipe out.

ISO1250 left top ID, left bottom EX2, right top LR, right bottom OOC

This one is to show how fine hair is handled. ID seems to get along better with those fine details than the others.

My impressions: The OOC does very good most of the time. It has the best color of all and balances noise and sharpness well. Good if you don't want to postprocess.

LR looks good on the first view with sharper details than the OOC images but it has a paintbrush effect to the images. They look realistic but painted at the same time. The black crusching is an issue.

ID does a very good job when it comes to detail and noise. It produces the finest details but EX2 is better on some textures. The colors are close to the OOC but lack some refinement to show more graduations.

EX2 does very good too. My settings produces a grainier look than the ID images but sharpness is up there with ID. It shows more shadown detail than LR and colors are more like the OOC than with ID.

Overall the samples look very similar (on the first look).

What do you think?

oscarvdvelde wrote:

To get maximum detail the most important thing is to go to the Noise tab and change from "High Resolution" to "High Speed". This reduces smearing of detail which happens even when all NR sliders are at zero. It is just not so effective in noise reduction when needed.

Then in Development I usually keep the slider at its default setting.

In Sharpness the finest look is usually Pure detail combined with something like 60-80 on outline and 10-20 on detail.

It is a bit laborious because I don't know a way to make these settings load as default. In RawTherapee I saved a profile and set it as a default for opening new images, instant sharpness/microcontrast pop.

If you create a custom Taste, won't it automatically apply the setting you want?

-- hide signature --

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lightningwizard
http://www.lightningwizard.com

RMGoodLight wrote:

Just for sience I compared the OOC, Lightroom, Irident Developer and EX2 images. Here we go.

All images got the same treatment: +0.7EV, Astia profile.

LR: color noise reduction 15, sharpness detail 100, mask 10

Irident Developer: color noise 6, luma noise 3, sharpness reveal

EX2: my latest settings for sharpness and noise reduction

ISO3200, left top ID, left bottom OOC, right top LR, right bottom EX2

ISO1600 left top ID, left bottom EX2, right top LR, right bottom OOC

The difference with the wood of the seat is very interesting.

ISO2500 left top ID, left bottom OOC, right top LR, right bottom EX2

ISO5000 left top ID, left bottom EX2, right top LR, right bottom OOC

ISO200 left top ID, left bottom EX2, right top LR, right bottom OOC

ISO200 left top ID, left bottom EX2, right top LR, right bottom OOC

This one is interesting because of the dark shadow part of the jeans. You can see that LR crushes the blacks and the film simulation of ID posterizes the dark parts so that both loose shadow detail here. You can see that the yellow strings are not yellow with LR and OOC anymore too.

ISO200 left top ID, left bottom EX2, right top LR, right bottom OOC

Another interesting one is the handling of red cloth. No the EX2 example is not noisy it is showing cloth detail that the others wipe out.

ISO1250 left top ID, left bottom EX2, right top LR, right bottom OOC

This one is to show how fine hair is handled. ID seems to get along better with those fine details than the others.

My impressions: The OOC does very good most of the time. It has the best color of all and balances noise and sharpness well. Good if you don't want to postprocess.

LR looks good on the first view with sharper details than the OOC images but it has a paintbrush effect to the images. They look realistic but painted at the same time. The black crusching is an issue.

ID does a very good job when it comes to detail and noise. It produces the finest details but EX2 is better on some textures. The colors are close to the OOC but lack some refinement to show more graduations.

EX2 does very good too. My settings produces a grainier look than the ID images but sharpness is up there with ID. It shows more shadown detail than LR and colors are more like the OOC than with ID.

Overall the samples look very similar (on the first look).

What do you think?

Astia is, IMO a tough sim with a dark shot, as it has hard shadows (despite the "soft" rhetoric by Fuji) I'm not personally convinced that Adobe's Fuji film sims have all that much to do with Fuji... (no edvidence, just a hunch)

LR seems very sensitive to sharpening settings... there's certainly no one size fits all!

some times in LR, I find that a larger radius, moderate detail, and 30-40 on the sharpening slider works better

Others will have their own settings I'm sure.

Tim Simmons wrote:

stillman3 wrote:

Adam Bonn has made a 4 part article on using RFC

https://adambonn.com/my-love-affair-with-the-fujifilm-x-pro1/xp2-thirty-seven/

This is very useful.

Cheers Eric

That's the tutorial that got me comfortable enough to go ahead and purchase Silkypix Developer Studio Pro 7. Now if there could be more guidance on that version...

I feel strangely scared that I've somehow led you down a dark alley ;D

I use SP7 Pro a lot and have done for about 7 months, there's still things I can't really get my head around in it.. When I get it singing, I really like it though.

I'm not really obessive about pixel peeping (fair play to those that are, it's just not me) so I wouldn't have any specific sharpening settings to offer. My opinion is that the natural sharp performs better than the RFC engine though.

It also seems (a lot of the time) to make a better job of artifact control with one of the Fuji sims than a native one

If you're performing highlight recovery, the highlight controller sliders can be useful, they seem to work better and give you more with the normal highlight slider rather than the HDR one

conversely, the HDR shadow slider seems to have far more to give than the normal shadow slider

If you're playing with exposure push, then there's definitely a relationship to balance between NR and demosaicing sharpness or else it seems to run out of colour gamut, it's not like (say) LR when you can 'just' bump the exposure slider 3 stops and then deal with the noise

Base ISO shots, I zero out all of the NR sliders, I find the colour noise one in particular to be far to aggressive at base ISO

Some one earlier in the thread asked about changing the defaults it uses with images, I cover this in my artcile that's linked in this thread by someone else, but basically, make a taste and set it as the default.

Make any sharp/NR/demosaicing changes you want at the very end or the very begining, these take the longest for SP to apply and keep you waiting quite a while for the file to preview... although you might very well have a better computer than I do!

I wrote the article about RFC because info on it seemed sparse and I read to many people claiming it "didn't have many features" and I thought, well it's far from the last word in image manipulation, but it has a ton of decent stuff for the tog that can expose well in camera and it's free.

I didn't realise that anyone had actually read it

Then I saw this thread in my site traffic stats and thought I'd say hi and see what you were all saying.

If anyone has taken any benefit from that RFC article, then I'm delighted, it was a real PITA to write!

stillman3 wrote:

Adam Bonn has made a 4 part article on using RFC

https://adambonn.com/my-love-affair-with-the-fujifilm-x-pro1/xp2-thirty-seven/

This is very useful.

Cheers Eric

Thank you Eric

It would be interesting to see a comparison between the ITX and Silkypix RAW converter on busy foliage.
-Paul

third son wrote:

It would be interesting to see a comparison between the ITX and Silkypix RAW converter on busy foliage.
-Paul

Do you mean the ID X-Trans DNG convertor?

I suspect that XID would edge it, especially on mid to far distance objects

Give it a go - SP V7 has a trial usage period, XID is trial forever with a watermark and RFC is completely FOC

Adam Bonn wrote:

third son wrote:

It would be interesting to see a comparison between the ITX and Silkypix RAW converter on busy foliage.
-Paul

Do you mean the ID X-Trans DNG convertor?

I suspect that XID would edge it, especially on mid to far distance objects

Give it a go - SP V7 has a trial usage period, XID is trial forever with a watermark and RFC is completely FOC

Hi Adam....I read your blog with regards to RFC after I had been using it for a while.  Thanks for the terrific write up!  I also tried the ID X-Trans DNG converter-->LR6. I don't see a lot of difference myself.  I also looked into RawTherapee-->LR6 or DxO Pro 11.  Photoninja also seems to do pretty well but I didn't want to pay $100 for just a demosaicing tool.

I figured the Silkypix RFC was designed for my XT1 so went into it with a preconceived notion that it should be pretty good.  This bias may have swayed my decision not to purchase the XID-->DNG converter at this time.

That is also why I asked if anyone else had made that comparison.

third son wrote:

Adam Bonn wrote:

third son wrote:

It would be interesting to see a comparison between the ITX and Silkypix RAW converter on busy foliage.
-Paul

Do you mean the ID X-Trans DNG convertor?

I suspect that XID would edge it, especially on mid to far distance objects

Give it a go - SP V7 has a trial usage period, XID is trial forever with a watermark and RFC is completely FOC

Hi Adam....I read your blog with regards to RFC after I had been using it for a while. Thanks for the terrific write up! I also tried the ID X-Trans DNG converter-->LR6. I don't see a lot of difference myself. I also looked into RawTherapee-->LR6 or DxO Pro 11. Photoninja also seems to do pretty well but I didn't want to pay $100 for just a demosaicing tool.

I figured the Silkypix RFC was designed for my XT1 so went into it with a preconceived notion that it should be pretty good. This bias may have swayed my decision not to purchase the XID-->DNG converter at this time.

That is also why I asked if anyone else had made that comparison.

Hi Paul,

Thanks very much.

The problem with this sort of thing is that it can be user subjective, very dependant on what screen we use and ultimately very much based on how tolerant we are on imperfections within our images.

How often do we see someone post an image they consider to be sharp only to be debunked by someone else?

Digital sharpness is effectively micro contrast (IMO) and when we sharpen a shot we can easily face the dilema of some bits looking great and other bits looking too crunchy, so do we downgrade the great bits to merely good and lose the bad, or do we decide that the bad bits are unimportant and great should remain?

This is why sharpening is an image-by-image affair and not a 'hey guys if you set your sharpening to XYZ on all your shots, then it's fantastic' like we often see written on the net...

Sorry a bit of a philosophical digression there

I've played a LITTLE bit with XID, made some dngs and put them into SilkyPix

My OPINION?

it's win some, lose some, draw some tbh

XID (for me) beats SP V7 with mid to far away fine detail, I need to zoom in, but to my eye it's there for sure (OMMV)

To my eye XID is APPROX equal to SP v7 on close up stuff, again OMMV

To my eye XID is a BIT worse than SP v7 on high ISO stuff where it also brings out a bit of noise and NR removes any detail advantage

But I haven't played with XID extensively and there's bound to be better settings for different shots, both in XID itself and in the app that one uses to edit the dng

There also seems to be a lens connotation as well...

XID gives me more from my 35/1.4 (compared to SP v7 in the conditions outlined above) than it does my xf18. This is quite possibly because the 35 is sharper than the 18 so there's more scope for fine detail

Like you say $100 for PN that you'll most likely only use for demosaicing is a lot

But IMO $30 for a demosaicing tool that works better on a handful of shots is probably worth getting, but I'm going to sleep on it for a bit and wait to next month

Hi Adam,

I am with you in that I don't batch process my files but take time to tweak each one to get the scene I experienced when I was there.  The problem with photography is that the experience of "being there" cannot be conveyed since the viewer can't feel immersed in the subject matter, that is what it felt like all around you when the shot was taken. We try to get close when we process an image to convey that feeling to others.  I do it to remind myself why I took the shot it in the first place.

Philosophy aside....I will be watching with anticipation when IXD becomes a clear winner.  I feel Brian has done a great job with what he has produced so far.