Aftershot Pro and Nikon NEF files

[kupuna]

My transition from Bibble Pro to Aftershot Pro has been a mixed experience. In image areas with large contrasts, like dark branches against the sky, colour artifacts appear, sometimes leaving Aftershot unusable. Initially I suspected my new Nikon J1 to be the cause of the problem, but I had seen those artifacts, similar to moire, in images from my D300, too.

Re-installing Bibble Pro provided the answer I needed. Bibble Pro still produces the sharp and clean images it always did, from D300 and J1 alike. This has to be a bug, and until that bug has been fixed, I will have to rely on my good old Bibble Pro, or ViewNX.

Aftershot Pro: http://kupuna.net/guests/dsc_0168aftershot.jpg
Bibble Pro: http://kupuna.net/guests/dsc_0168bibble.jpg

[afx]

Switch off AS sharpening and use Wavelet sharpen instead.

cheers
afx

[kupuna]

Switch off AS sharpening and use Wavelet sharpen instead.

cheers
afx

That helps, but it needs some tweaking not to lose the smallest details. I still prefer Bibble Pro.

[tigloo]

I encountered a similar problem with a shot from my D7000. I'm not a Bibble user, I only started with AfterShot. However, I'm really surprised that Bibble does such a great job compared to AfterShot. It's close to Capture NX2! As you said, Wavelet sharpening helps, but it's nowhere near as good as the Bibble output that you posted.

I thought the problem was isolated to my single high-ISO shot, I'll try to make a few comparisons over the weekend.

[thufor]

Switch off AS sharpening and use Wavelet sharpen instead.

cheers
afx

That helps, but it needs some tweaking not to lose the smallest details. I still prefer Bibble Pro.

There's also nice USM plugin...

[kupuna]

Thanks for your suggestions! Each of them is valuable and worth considering. However, since the problem described popped up, or increased dramatically, at the transition from Bibble to Aftershot, I regard it as a bug which needs to be corrected.

It seems that the problem is more evident with my Nikon 1 J1 than my venerable D300, and I suspect that the J1 may have a 'weaker' antialiasing filter in order to get the most out of its 10 Mpixel sensor. That may in its turn give rise to moire and aliasing problems, which again is the RAW converter's task to solve. The camera itself, ViewNX, CaptureNX and Adobe Camera Raw deal with it effectively, while preserving sharpness.

[swimmer]

Switch off AS sharpening and use Wavelet sharpen instead.

cheers
afx

There's also nice USM plugin...

USM crashes my ASP nearly every time if I crop an image ... removing the plugin and switching to Wavelet Sharpen resolved that for me

[thufor]

Switch off AS sharpening and use Wavelet sharpen instead.

cheers
afx

There's also nice USM plugin...

USM crashes my ASP nearly every time if I crop an image ... removing the plugin and switching to Wavelet Sharpen resolved that for me ;-)

Works for me, whether cropped or not...