> That overall maze pattern seems to me unrelated to my 'worms'. The overall
> maze has to be a systematic failure of Bayer processing, doesn't it?
It actually may be. The worms show up and tend to follow "paths of
least resistance" through the image. I'm wondering what you see if you
take one of those wormy pictures and go to extremes in settings in
ACR/Lightroom to see if you can get the maze/maize pattern to show up.
If it shows up, then that might be a contributor to how the worms
wiggle.
The subject of noise reduction is also tainted by the "hidden" noise
reduction that happens on-chip with the CMOS sensor. With many CMOS
sensors, the noise is essentially mapped out. While under normal
circumstances you would never see the negative effects of this, but
under extremes, you see a mottling show up. Combine this with the
after-conversion noise reduction and you've got a 12 ounce can full of
night crawlers.
> When I occasionally compared it to Canon's DPP, I preferred ACR.
Agreed. However, I think DPP's skin tones are better.
> I'm not convinced about that. I've been quite happy with the way it handles
> highlights. But I never use it for more than pulling down to eliminate
> clipping. If that's extensive, I may also adjust blacks and whites to
> maintain overall tonal balance. Any further highlight adjustments are made
> with PS's more subtle, adjustable tools.
>
> But then, you and Joel disagree with me about clipped highlight channels, so
> you may have different criteria.
I'm thinking that the latest Lightroom does highlight recovery about
the best I've seen. There is certainly some artificial intelligence
kicking in to fix the color shifts, but they can still occur if you
nuke the sliders.
> I've not tried SilkyPix. Every review I've read talks about how clumsy it is
> to use. It came with my Pannys, but I've not installed it.
I believe this is a case where you paid attention to the nattering
nabobs of negativism without verifying for yourself. I would
absolutely NOT call it clumsy. In fact, it's actually remarkably good.
However, the biggest problem is that it does not support JPEG files,
nor does the included version with the cameras support all raw file
types like the full version does. It is also very slow in drawing the
thumbnails on an old 32bit machine. I would call most criticisms of
SilkyPix woefully inaccurate and based on only a brief test and no
effort to understand the power of the interface. You can do more with
Silkypix in color and tonal manipulation than with pretty much any
other commercially available converter.
One thing that SilkyPix does, which is really slick, is that it will
actually do the mix-minus that I talked about before. When you select
a different "film type", it actually uses the green (mostly the green)
channels in not just an additive way, but a subtractive way to
actually extend the color gamut beyond what a normal RGB array can
achieve. This plays into what I've talked about before how the eye
doesn't see "red", but actually sees wide-band orange. Red is a
derived color based on the absence of green. The human vision system
determines that the subject is red because there is no green. Silkypix
does the same thing, thereby extending reds into a deeper maroon and
the blues deeper into magenta than is normally possible.
I choose to not use Silkypix because of the file compatibility issue,
but in all honesty, I think I'll have to go back to it just to get the
artifacts to disappear and use it for initial batch conversion of
files for Lightroom to then use. Some of the standard film settings in
Silkypix are a bit off, but they are good starting points to see how
you might want to reinterpret the image with different color/tonal
bias.
The difference, here, between Silkypix and Lightroom is that Lightroom
applies the color/tonal shifts after conversion, whereas Silkypix
appears to apply them during the conversion. (which contributes to
overall speed issues). The results CAN be the same, but the colors can
look forced in Lightroom. You see this with the saturation slider. In
Lightroom, if you crank the snot out of the saturation slider, very
very ugly things happen. In Silkypix, if you crank the snot out of the
saturation slider, you get very very different ugly things happening.
--
Ken Norton
ken@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.zone-10.com
--
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