Aftershot Pro Compared to Lightroom 3.6

[pefunk]

.. you like to take images in harsh light and then push them towards the flat HDR look..... if you take a look at my webarchive you will see i really like dark, fat shadows.

I know there is harsh light.I can measure it. But my eyes - or is it the brains - adjust. I actually see detail in the shadows; the sensor does too (otherwise there would not be anything to retrieve). It is only the default tone curve that cannot cope and I don't expect it to cope. What I aim at during raw-conversion is to re-create my vision, how I experienced the scene at the location. Should I end up with a flat HDR look I would look at it as a failure. My "hero" is Ansel Adams": every zone should be represented on the final print. (I am still mourning the loss of Sean's Ansel pro plug-in).

In case anybody is interested, I put a small gallery of those ominous pics on the web that serve me as touchstone for every new ASP version. Actuallly I would like to swich back to Bibble/ASP if only for the one reason that it doesn't force me to use a library. So here is my gallery: http://www.funken.biz/Fotografie

Peter

[hpmickey]

So here is my gallery: http://www.funken.biz/Fotografie

Hello pefunk, nice traveler's gallery

Just noticed that your photo discussed above was taken by Sony A500. I have bought one recently, and found that:
1) A500 has less space in shadows but more in highlights (on the contrary to my older cam - Minolta 5D), and
2) ASP has far more problems with A500 than with 5D. Particularly in dark greens ASP produces an ugly blotchy green noise.
3) on the other hand, color seems to be more accurate in the case of A500

I think that part of the problem could be a wrong camera profile. There was no extra profile for A500 in B5, neither in ASP 1.0.0.39. I suspect ASP of using the Sony A550 profile instead, which is a bit unfortunate because A500 has a different sensor. All the profiles are probably embedded now (at least I do not see them in the /opt/AfterShotPro directory anymore), so one cannot tell whether they added new profiles or fine-tuned old ones.

Anyway, here is my attempt to convert your raw file:

Tenriffa_2011-10-15_110839.ARW.xmp.zip

(2.9 KiB) Downloaded 235 times

.
Btw, your LR4 conversion looks a bit overdone/oversharpened to me but tonality is definitively better. I was not able to achieve it easily.

Michal

[pefunk]

Hi Michal,

thanks for your contribution. I can open your file in the editor, but it is too much work to read. So I copied it into my pictures folder to replace my original xmp. I see I get three different versions, of which I like V3 best. The Sony A500 is exremely good in the highlights and still preserves detail in the shadows, you just need a raw converter that is able to recover it without introducing too much noise.

As I may have been a bit heavy handed with the sharpening, you may have overdone the noise reduction (Raw Impule Noise+Raw Noise+NN Luma @6,10,14, Chroma at default levels) quite a bit of the dark green detail has been lost. You also adjusted the blacks to -10 and changed the curves on the "dark side", which cost you almost all local contrast and you also lost the blacks.

Having said all that, your version is still much better than my try with ASP. I have been struggling with shadows (esp. green but not only) ever since the first preview of Bibble 5. My succession of cameras was Minolta Dimage 7hi, Konica Minolta A200, Sony A100, Sony A500. I do not experience more difficulties with the A500 than with the other cameras. Maybe all profiles need a work over, but with all of them beeing discontinued I doubt that will ever happen. I don't know how difficult it would be to enhance ASP to be able to read other peoples profiles (RawTherapee in its latest version can read .dcp from ACR).

ASP also desperately needs a better noise handling (at least for my Sony and Minolta files). In this area LR beats anything that I have tried over the years in terms of ease of use and in results.

Peter

[hpmickey]

Hi Peter, yes the V3 was the final one.

... you may have overdone the noise reduction (Raw Impule Noise+Raw Noise+NN Luma @6,10,14, Chroma at default levels) quite a bit of the dark green detail has been lost.

Good point. You are right, but I can only set the Strength and Smooth params as I do not have the registered Noise Ninja.

Maybe all profiles need a work over, but with all of them beeing discontinued I doubt that will ever happen.

Hmm, I hope for better. The Sony A5xx line is not that old...

I don't know how difficult it would be to enhance ASP to be able to read other peoples profiles (RawTherapee in its latest version can read .dcp from ACR).

At least the icc camera user profiles can be loaded now. Undoubtedly, the .dcp compatibility would be a really great feature.

Michal

[nyukuri]

Well, I agree with your comparison between ASP and Lightroom based on this picture.

But there is one thing here I think ASP processes much nicer! Compare the left bottom corner, the details and texture in the black dress. In the Lightroom version, they are gone, just a black big paddle. ASP shows in this corner much more detail and texture - at least on my monitor