DPP vs Lightroom 3 for raw processing - some findings

arad85

arad85

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Good article.

One thing I'd like to comment on though is that unfortunately there is no such thing as standard profile. The profiles in ACR (either by Adobe profiler or XRite one) ideally need to be built for your camera/lens combination and the light you shoot under to be accurate enough. What complicates matters is also the fact that shooting CC24 target to build a good profile is increasingly difficult and you will get a varying results shooting it at an angle with uneven lighting. Here is an interesting discussion about shooting profiling targets.

Don't get me wrong - profiles shipped with ACR can be a good approximation but the more I used other raw convertors the more I realised how difficult it could be to control colour in ACR and how bad (colour-wise) some of their profiles for my D300 are.

ACR choice of WB algorithm also does not contribute to better colour.
 
dalex_257 said:
Good article.

One thing I'd like to comment on though is that unfortunately there is no such thing as standard profile. The profiles in ACR (either by Adobe profiler or XRite one) ideally need to be built for your camera/lens combination and the light you shoot under to be accurate enough.
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Thanks.

By "Standard Profile" shipped with ACR, I mean the one that Adobe has in the develop pull down. This is what I currently have in mine:

ACR.gif


I select the Camera Standard profile and the Adobe Standard profile to show what you'd get if you just used what comes with Lightroom/ACR. The Winter Sunshine profile is the profile that has been generated from the pictures on the first page so from my personal camera/lens combination.
 
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arad85 said:
Thanks.

By "Standard Profile" shipped with ACR, I mean the one that Adobe has in the develop pull down. This is what I currently have in mine:
Click to expand...

I know what you meant - but unlike camera manufacturer's own software profiles that match in-camera processing and even the camera sensor variations, ACR profiles are just built differently. They built by Adobe using a specific instance of the camera with lighting setup known only by them. They don't respond to camera/sensor variability that well and will get different results matching against different cameras.

As an example, when I had D200 I was pretty satisfied with Adobe Standard profile that you refer to. It gave me relatively close colour to what I expected 90% of the times. When I moved to D300, that situation worsened. It is in fact that bad that I use untwisted D2X profile now as my default rarely going to Adobe Standard and built a few of my own profiles (it is a time consuming operation so I only did it for a few lens/lighting situation combos). That is only when I am using LR for raw development and lately I find myself doing more and more things in RPP - gives me much better colour and with repeatable and consistent results.
 
dalex_257 said:
I know what you meant - but unlike camera manufacturer's own software profiles that match in-camera processing and even the camera sensor variations,
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The thing that surprised me was that the Xrite profile was closer to Adobe Standard than it was Camera Standard. It just indicates that for Canon at least, colours from Canon s/w aren't designed to be accurate, they're designed to be pleasing.
 
arad85 said:
It just indicates that for Canon at least, colours from Canon s/w aren't designed to be accurate, they're designed to be pleasing.
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Well Canon did change their Standard style to give it more colour and punch and to look more like Nikon as the felt people thought Canons were dull.

I can see you've done a lot of work testing and publishing the results, which makes interesting reading :thumbs:

I am actual surprised at how much of a difference there was, and as you said before it's really in the blues and greens.
It now looks like Canon DPP is lagging behind, maybe Aperture 'vs' Lightroom 'vs' Others is starting to pay off for use users.
 
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arad85 said:
The thing that surprised me was that the Xrite profile was closer to Adobe Standard than it was Camera Standard. It just indicates that for Canon at least, colours from Canon s/w aren't designed to be accurate, they're designed to be pleasing.
Click to expand...

Camera Standard is not a Canon profile - its build by Adobe to simulate the colours from one of the Picture Styles. It does not also match the Picture Styles exactly - it is basically an Adobe approximation of it.

You will find that pretty much all camera manufacturers go down this route - they all try to make colours more pleasing rather than accurate (though they usually do have some sort of neutral profile that supposed to be accurate). I don't think it should come as a big surprise though as this was exactly like that with film - emulsions were designed not just by scientists but by people with experience in art and aesthetics. Look at Velvia for example - you can hardly claim it does an accurate colour reproduction.
 
Interesting article Andy. On my phone at the mo so its hard to judge the differences (plus, the rollover doesn't work) but have subscribed to look at home :)
 
dalex_257 said:
Camera Standard is not a Canon profile - its build by Adobe to simulate the colours from one of the Picture Styles. It does not also match the Picture Styles exactly - it is basically an Adobe approximation of it.
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I understand that. What I was saying was that I was surprised at how different it is from the X-rite profile which is supposed to be "correct".

Thanks for the kind words Pat/Mark. Always interesting to do these things yourself and get a feeling one way or another :). Will look into different ways of doing rollovers for mobile when I have some time (assuming it is possible of course). The ones on the site are Javascript, there should be a way to do it neatly in CSS.
 
arad85 said:
I understand that. What I was saying was that I was surprised at how different it is from the X-rite profile which is supposed to be "correct".
Click to expand...

When I tried both Adobe and XRite profile builders from the same target I found the profiles they built were quite different. In my case it was really visible and Adobe one was quite a lot worse.

I have read a comment on dpreview challenging the fact that the profile building is nearly instantaneous with both XRite and Adobe software. It was referring to the fact that well known ArgyllCMS (open source colour management suite that has really good profile engine and math behind calculating it) takes quite some time (can't remember the precise time but it was in a range of minutes) to calculate resulting profile out of CC24 shot.
 
Thanks Alexey... Will do some more experiments.
 
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