RAW open comparison

[Lundberg02]

Because I'm fairly confused about what is going on when RAW files are opened in various applications, I'm attaching a screen shot of the results obtained when opening an image in Photoshop, Photoline, Colorperfect, Preview(Mac), and Lightzone. All the images are from a Fujifilm camera. The Fuji RAW was converted to DNG in the Adobe DNG Converter. ColorPerfect does not open DNG, but opens a tiff made from a RAW in a filter host app, in this case Photoshop. I previously posted a similar comparison in my Highlight Recovery topic but I must have done something wrong and I decided to repeat the test using ColorPerfect and Lightzone in addition. As you can see Photoshop and PhotoLine are similar except for a greenish cast in Photoline. The other three are similarly washed out and neutral, with Lightzone pretty dark. I have so far been unsuccessful in bringing up the last three to the nearly acceptable images of the first two. I admit I am not as familiar with any of them as I am with Photoshop. I have decided to do lens correction in PTLens for ease of use. It seems obvious that Photoshop and PhotoLine are doing some contrast and saturation adjustments based on some estimate of what the viewer should expect to see, and I have seen somewhere that Photoshop does do this. I would be grateful to the Hubers if they would explain what they do and compare it to Photoshop. Why the other three are nearly greyscale is above my pay grade. The picture was taken in natural light and on automatic, which resulted in about a half stop underexposure in this camera.
Many RAW converters use dcraw as their baseline, GIMP, AccuRaw, all the inexpensive apps probably. I am guessing that Capture One and DxO do not, and certainly not PS and LightRoom. Aperture is a maybe.
Imaging work seems to be empiricism and personal taste with web or print orientation thrown in to the mix. There are probably a million workflows that photographers use successfully for what they want. I use a 1.8 gamma correction calibrated system because I only care about inkjet prints from an Epson six color, and it works for me. If every image I post here looks washed out, so be it.

[bkh]

BThe Fuji RAW was converted to DNG in the Adobe DNG Converter.

Just out of curiosity: why do you convert to DNG first? I suppose that most converters will do a much better job if presented the original camera raw file rather than something pre-cooked by Adobe software.

Cheers

Burkhard.

[Lundberg02]

One of the apps wouldn't open the Fuji RAW. I don't recall which one right now. I take your point and I did intend to try it again with the RAW files and also open with a few other apps, like Lyn, Camera Bag 2, Capture One Express, and others.

[OldRadioGuy]

One of the apps wouldn't open the Fuji RAW. I don't recall which one right now. I take your point and I did intend to try it again with the RAW files and also open with a few other apps, like Lyn, Camera Bag 2, Capture One Express, and others.

Like Burkhard, I was wondering why you would want to convert to Adobe's DNG before sending the camera's raw image to to a raw processor. I think I saw something on one of the processor forums about the Fuji raw format presenting special problems for some third-party raw converters. That may be why some applications have yet to support Fuji raw files. Does Fuji supply its own software for developing the raw file?

(DxO is the only company I know that actually provides a development roadmap for support of specific cameras. http://www.dxo.com/intl/photography/dxo ... -equipment)

As far as blown highlights goes, "highlight recovery" is really a misleading term. The recovery method appears to rely on stealing image data from one of the rgb channels. Photo Ninja and Raw Therapee usually do as well as any applications I've tried when it comes to highlight recovery. DxO Optics Pro can squeeze out just about all the highlight detail present in a raw file. Although I often prefer PhotoLine layers and a soft copy brush to fix small blowout problems.

Bob

[Lundberg02]

Adobe offers a couple tools for creating DNG camera profiles. I'll probably get into that a bit later. My Fuji is an obsolete model I bought very cheap to get into RAW, intending to upgrade later. Foveon and Fuji's X-Tran are out of my price range right now.
Photoshop recognized the DNG as a Fuji, but not the exact model, FWIW. I would find it hard to believe that contrast and saturation are dependent on camera profile. A camera profile would most likely include a histogram table, uniformity, Von Kries coefficients, that sort of thing.

[Lundberg02]

Now I'm more confused. My camera, Fujifilm FinePix F600EXR has been in the ACR supported list since 6.5, yet there is no lens correction for anything but the Fuji X100.
Also, I went back and reopened the bedroom painting from the RAW instead of the DNG, in Photoshop, and it looks unsaturated just like the last three, so the DNG conversion added the contrast and saturation that PhotoLine also showed.
I'm lost, I have no idea what the deal is.
In my highlight recovery thread I showed three examples of the same image, all unsaturated. The Photoshop example there was from the RAW and not the DNG. Preview(Mac) will not open the Fuji RAF RAW image.
I managed to find the SilkyPix RAW converter that Fuji offers as a download for my camera. It too converts without saturation. I guess this means that I can't trust DNG conversions. I have never seen this mentioned anywhere, so I suppose that will be my Google Of The Day. The SilkyPix conversion also removes lens distortion without any human intervention, which I am delighted about.
I' m going to have to rethink my tentative workflow for this camera. It looks like I won't need to go through the lens profile exercise, thanks to the good folks at Fuji. I am coming to believe that the camera was an even better deal than I thought, despite some quibbles about color depth, and its autofocus in video mode.

[cimfine]

Hi,
this is really a complex matter and I can understand your experience from my own trials. One word to your comment "I would find it hard to believe that contrast and saturation are dependent on camera profile." - I sure does! The information stored in the raw files is not a complete picture and its the interpretation of the raw converter, that you see. Different converters will give you different results. With Adobe Raw you can load different camera profiles to start with but even with them I never managed to get the same nice colors that Capture One 7 renders. The Photoline interpretation will for sure be different as well, so far I did not try it.

When it comes to DNG there are a lot of oppinions in the web, but it does a lot of transformation and it is a black box. And a black box that can change next time Adobe decides to do updates. Seriously, I would never convert my raw files and through them away as some people recommend. Raw converters usually read only dng files, that some cameras directly produce (Pentax, Leica) because they are defined in file structure and the color profile of the camera and the raw converter software can be calibrated towards them.

If you are happy with the Fuji conversion with regard to lens correction I would use it, export the result (maybe after some color tweaks) and do the rest in Photoline. The transfer format depends on your quality demand and hdd space, tiff 16bit would certainly be the best.

[Lundberg02]

I certainly appreciate your input. I haven't been able to find anything by googling yet that even begins to explain the boosted contrast and saturation. I plan to open all RAWs from this camera in the SilkyPix converter and do some preliminary adjustments there. Since it removes barreling and keystoning, I am still wondering where I should remove rotation in my workflow. I find it easy in both PS and PL. I don't know ifI am gifted with discernment or not, but I can see a quarter degree of rotation fairly easily. I wish there was a better way of getting rid of rotation than putting a cropping rectangle on the image to estimate. I have just bought a little cheap app called DxO Perspective that seems to offer a very easy and intuitive method of correcting perspective. I don't own DxO itself, but it's reviews are very good for lens effects which makes me confident that this piece will be a good tool.

[Lundberg02]

This comment from Marty German in the Flickr Digital Photography Public Group:

Results are what really matter. Take a few of your best images in RAW and print them using the various programs (free trials for all of them) and you will be shocked at the differences, as I was.

[cimfine]

... I wish there was a better way of getting rid of rotation than putting a cropping rectangle on the image to estimate.

Are you not using the straightening tool? I think this is pretty much state-of-the-art. The only newer alternative I am aware of is the automatic tool in Lightroom5. However, this is in my eyes poorly inplemented: it takes a few seconds to calculate (and you do not see that things are going on), it presents one results, which is "take it or leave it", there is no finetunig possible and it is not interacting with the normal rotation tool. I preferr the Photoline approach.

I don't own DxO itself, but it's reviews are very good for lens effects which makes me confident that this piece will be a good tool.

DxO is certainly a top of the line raw converter, but for my taste it is relying too much on automatic processing. The lens corrections are excellent, but only if your lens/camera combination is supported. Depending on the camera it is also pretty expensive.

[Lundberg02]

Lessons learned:
Use the camera's raw converter.
Nail down workflow and use the most user friendly tool for each task, even though it may a bit of time to change apps.
Understand your camera, raw converter, editors, and printer.
Avoid apps that impose catalogs, use your own file system for each job.

I haven't mastered the camera itself, there are a lot of modes. I have the workflow in hand except for the placement of the step for rotation. Not sure whether to do it before or after perspective. My prints match the screen very well when I want a quality print on matte.

After much googling, I think I understand that DNG has some problem with the Fuji EXR sensor. The EXR is the predecessor of the X-Trans and they both have the 45 degree orientation for improved resolution. The DNG conversion produces a result similar to the in-camera jpg, so there must be some scaling error in the contrast and saturation when converting the DNG to tiff in PS and PL. PhotoLine imposes a slight colorcast compared to Photoshop when the DNG is converted to tiff. Other raw processors do not do this, although I haven't tried all of the many apps I have as yet.

[greenmorpher]

Read all this and heaved a great sigh of relief that I work in JPEG! LOL!

Cheers, geoff

[Lundberg02]

I hear that! I've used ACR quite a bit but this is my first adventure into owning a RAW camera. I never expected to have a problem with a DNG conversion, kinda threw me for a while. I'm going to compare the DNG to tiff with the camera's jpg and compare both of those with process results from PS ACR and Photoline. Then I'll reshoot with a bit more exposure and use the easiest way.

[cimfine]

Why do you bother with DNG anyway?

[neilgcart]

To try and bring a bit more light to this I have been using DNG for years and have encountered most all of the issues mentioned and none are in fact solely down to the fact that you are converting to DNG. It took a lot of research to uncover why I was seeing so much variation opening DNG files in different applications but once I understood it, I was able to work out a sensible workflow which has meant that DNG has personally brought me many benefits for the way I prefer to work. I will not go into the merits or otherwise of using DNG as that is another topic on its own. A few things to remember are:

A DNG file is a container for the RAW image, a Jpg preview and any development settings that a particular programme stores in it, so the process of converting to DNG in itself does not alter the image. Some will argue that the DNG conversion process does in fact do something to the RAW data but even if it does it would not account for the differences you are seeing.

The majority of RAW converters apply default setting to a RAW image when it is opened and these can be camera specific so you will see variations when opening the same image in different programs.

A RAW file contains information on some camera settings such as white balance along with the RAW image data. Some programs will use this data some will not.

When the DNG file is created the basic camera settings with the RAW image data from the original RAW file is used to produce the imbedded jpg so this will look different to the RAW image depending upon the program used to open the DNG file. This could use either Jpg image or RAW data as the displayed image and may open the RAW image with the basic adjustments applied or not.

If you make any non destructive adjustments to a DNG file the programme may or may not save these back to the imbedded Jpg. Lightroom for example will not update the Jpg unless you tell it to.

You can therefore see from the above that there are a number of factors that will affect what you see when opening an image saved in DNG format. There are a lot of other considerations and technicalities but the above gives you a good idea of why there is so much variation. This is not commonly understood and is one of the reasons why people fail to get on with DNG images.

Hopefully the above helps answer why you are seeing variation.

Neil