2008 State of Raw Developers: Quality for Normal Exposures

The release of Aperture 2 prompted our technical team at Capture Integration to compare the various options available to develop Phase One files. The increase in competition in the RAW development market is good for everyone. A Phase One shooter has no less than six unique processing engines from which to choose. We leave the judgment of the outcome of this comparison to you.

Software Tested

• Capture One 4.0.1 (download)
• Capture One Pro 3.7.8 (download)
• Apple Aperture 2.0 (download)
• Adobe Camera Raw 4.3.1 (download)
• Adobe Lightroom 1.31 (download)
• Iridient Raw Developer 1.7.2 (download)
• [To Be Tested] Raw Photo Processor (download)

Foreword and Disclaimer

Each raw processor has its own set of developing options. We consider ourselves experts in Capture One and have less experience with the other developers. Many of the choices we made are open for intelligent dissent. We have provided the original raw files and links to the trial versions of each developer so that you may make your own decisions. We would love to hear what you think; head to the luminous-landscape forum discussion of this article, or contact us directly.

Intention

The intention of this test was to see what each developer produced “out of the box” for a generic shooting situation. We did make some changes from the defaults of each program where we thought logical. We have documented all of these deviations from defaults (see “Processing Methods and Testing Notes”) and encourage you to do your own exploration.

There are many aspects of raw development, and this test should be viewed only a preliminary survey of performance under rather generic settings. Future tests may explore the following areas NOT explored in this test:

• processing long-exposures (e.g. one hour)
• skin tone rendition
• high ISOs
• highlight/shadow recovery
• push/pull processing
• speed of processing
• organization/workflow
• specialized tools such as the color editor
• moire reduction

Processing Methods and Testing Notes

• Exposure: All exposure settings were left at defaults. In Aperture, Adobe Camera Raw, and Lightroom this means the black level was left at 5. The exception to this was Adobe Camera Raw when importing the RAW which was inexplicably one stop below the consensus exposure of the other developers. For this one combination we set the exposure compensation to +1.1.
• White Balance: The white door at the top middle of the frame was used as the reference point for white balance. Initially we attempted to set the same temperature and tint, but this produced more variation. Aperture produced strongly pink highlights in this image and for this reason we manually matched the white balance point visually to match the other developed images. We have not yet explored if this pink-highlight problem is unique to this image, to all P30+ images or was the result of some errant setting.
• Color Space - In both versions of Capture One and in Iridient Raw Developer there was an option to select from among our ICC profiles for the input profile; in these cases we selected the P30+ Outdoor Daylight profile provided by Phase One. Note that Iridient Raw Developer does come with a P30 profile, which we chose not to use. The other developers only offered to use the embedded profile. Output profiles were marked on each file as either “Native P30+ Color Space” or “Adobe 1998″. As far as we can find, only Capture One was able to output a TIFF or JPG in the native color space of the camera. Keeping the original color space has definitive advantages in preventing the clipping of certain highly saturated colors.
• Sharpening, Noise Reduction, and other enhancements - Our desire was to process the files without sharpening so we could compare the detail retained by each developer and not the default sharpening levels. In both versions of Capture One and Irident Raw Developer we were able to “disable” sharpening, while in the other developers we could only set the sharpening to zero. Casual inspection indicates that Aperture may sharpen the file slightly even when set to zero, however this is not certain. The 100% TIFF crops were then sharpened in Photoshop with an unsharp mask [130 amount, 1.3 radius, 1.0 threshold]. All forms of noise reduction or artifact removal was set to zero, off, or the lowest available setting in each program.

Download Unsharpened Full-Res JPGs

• Adobe Camera Raw – From DNG [Adobe 1998] {17.8 MB}
• Adobe Camera Raw – From Raw [Adobe 1998] {21.9 MB}
  
• Aperture 2.0 – From DNG [Adobe 1998] {20.3 MB}*
  
• Capture One 3.7.8 [Adobe 1998] {18.4 MB}
  
• Capture One 3.7.8 [Native P30+ Color Space] {17.3 MB}
  
• Capture One 4.0 [Adobe 1998] {23.0 MB}**
• Light Room – From DNG [Adobe 1998] {22.0 MB}
  
• Light Room – From Raw [Adobe 1998] {21.9 MB}
  
• Raw Developer – From DNG [Adobe 1998] {23.6 MB}
  
• Raw Developer – From Raw [Adobe 1998] {23.5 MB}
  

Download Sharpened 100% Crops – TIFF

• Crop 1 [All Developers] {8.7 MB}
  
• Crop 2 [All Developers] {6.8 MB}

Download Raw Files Used for Input

• Original P30+ RAW and DNG Exported from Capture One 4.0 {89.5 MB}

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*It is unclear why the highlights developed by default as pink in Aperture. Capture Integration will be investigating whether this problem is limited to this image, this digital back (the P30+), or was the result of a mis-set option. Since Aperture 2.0 was just released it is also possible this glitch will be addressed very soon in a maintenance release, but this is just speculation.

**Capture One 4 allows for the export of the image with the embedded camera profile (i.e. the native color space of the camera). However, in our test this functionality misfired and produced an image with the sRGB color space.

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2008 State of Raw Developers: Speed

Hardware Setup

Eight Core Mac Pro – 2×3 Ghz
Mac OS 10.5.2
7 gig ram (667mhz ddr2)
Two 7200 rpm hard drives (OS on 300gig, Data on 500gig)

Software Tested

• Capture One 4.0.1 (download)
• Capture One Pro 3.7.8 (download)
• Apple Aperture 2.0 (download) [using DNGs exported from Capture One 4.0]
• Adobe Camera Raw 4.3.1 (download)
• Adobe Lightroom 1.31 (download)*
• Iridient Raw Developer 1.7.2 (download)

*Using DNGs exported from Capture One 4.0 as well as the native RAW format
*Using only DNG exported from Capture One 4.0

Intention

The intention of this test was to see how fast each raw processor could process a file. To increase accuracy we processed ten images at a time. Since most of our customers use Phase One digital backs we used raw files from one such back. In future tests we may measure performance of processing dSLR files such as the Canon 1Ds Mark III.

There are many aspects of raw development, and this test should be viewed only as a generic speed test. Future tests may explore the following areas NOT explored in this test:

Results

Comparison of Raw Processors: Ten Phase One P30+ Images were loaded into each program from a location on the main hard drive. In each program all settings were left at their defaults, except the destination for the processed files was set to a second hard drive. The time was measured from when the processing was requested (i.e. the button was pushed) to when the tenth file showed up in the finder.

Capture One 4.0 in Detail: There are several ways to convert images from RAW to use outside of Capture One. The resulting times for exporting to a Web Gallery, DNG, Full-Res JPG, and Full-Res 16 Bit TIFF. For all of our tests we processed raw files from one internal hard drive to a folder on a second internal hard drive, so in this set of data we compared the performance of either using this method (red) or using only one hard drive (light blue).