DIGITAL CAMERA RAW CONVERTER COMPARISONS
with Canon 1Ds Mk II, Canon 400D XTi, Canon 50D and Nikon D300 images
Adobe's ACR
(Photoshop & Lightroom), Bibble Pro, BreezeBrowser Pro, Capture One Pro,
Canon's Digital
Photo Pro, SilverFast HDR Studio and Silkypix Developer Studio
DIGITAL NOISE CONTROL AT ISO 1600
| This ISO 1600 photo from my 1Ds Mark II was probably underexposed about 2/3 stop considering its content. It is a great image for checking out digital noise (digital noise looks just like multicolored film grain). The 100% crops below are from the Panda's left ear. The images on the left were done with the converter's default conversion tool settings, including noise suppression. The images on the right are my best attempt to apply noise reduction manually using all the program's noise reduction tools. I tried to remove noise up to the point of diminishing returns with sharpness. | |
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Digital Photo Pro - default |
Digital Photo Pro - manual noise reduction |
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Canon Digital Photo Pro: Slider adjustments for both luminance and chrominance. Pretty nice job with very little color noise after applying tools manually. |
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Waiting on Bibble 5 release |
Waiting on Bibble 5 release |
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Bibble Pro |
Bibble Pro |
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BreezeBrowser Pro - default |
BreezeBrowser Pro - manual noise reduction |
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BreezeBrowser Pro: Has presets for noise reduction (off, low, normal and high). I used 'normal' for this comparison. There is still a a small amount of color noise or chromatic aberration in the white fur in the manually adjusted image. BreezeBrowser doesn't have magnification available for the preview image so it is impossible to fine tune this type of adjustment. |
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Capture One - default |
Capture One - manual noise reduction |
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Capture One Pro: Sliders for both luminance and color noise. Capture One's default noise reduction parameters worked quite well for this photo. When I adjusted the noise further manually the hairs became a little softer than most of the other manually adjusted images. |
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ACR - default |
ACR - manual noise reduction |
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Lightroom/Adobe Camera RAW: Sliders for both luminance and color noise. Lightroom/ACR's noise tool was very effective in providing noise reduction without overly softening the image. This is probably the best noise reduction result from my manual adjustment efforts. |
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Silkypix Developer Studio - default |
Silkypix Developer Studio - manual noise reduction |
| Silkypix Developer Studio 3: There are two sets of slider tools for noise control. The first set of two sliders is titled 'Noise Reduction' and contains a slider for 'False Color control' and a slider for 'Noise Reduction'. The second set of three sliders is named 'Noise Canceller' and contains a slider for 'Noise Level, Noise Cancel and Geometric NR'. Since these tools are named differently than most of the others, you can either read the very complete help document or just experiment. My approach is to give it a try and that's just what I did here on the manually adjusted image. I was pleased with the result. Lots of detail remains with just a slightly mottled background noise. | |
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SilverFast HDR Pro - default |
SilverFast HDR Pro - manual noise reduction |
| SilverFast HDR: Sliders for both luminance and color noise. My manual adjustment was effective in removing most of the color noise but less so reducing overall graininess without over softening the hairs. Also, for some reason the result of saving to JPEG was less friendly to this image then most of the rest. I suspect it had to do with the spatial frequency of the noise in this particular conversion. In other words the original TIFF file looked noticeably better than this JPEG. Living up to its name HDR has the best dynamic range in this comparison series | |
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| Capture One with all noise reduction tools OFF | Image to the left processed in CS4 with NoiseNinja Pro defaults |
| Here's an example of what an aftermarket noise removal plugin can do. The result is as good or better than anything I was able to do manually with the different converter's tools. | |
