So long and thanks for the fish...

[DocBrown]

This morning I had a bit of an epiphany. I decided to go back and reprocess with LR 4.1 some shots I made earlier in the summer. One in particular was an antique retail case of sewing thread. I shot it hand held with my Canon 7D at ISO 1600, f/2.8 in very low light. When processed in ASP and trying to deal with the noise I lost much of the detail in the spools of thread. Pretty colors, but little detail. Disappointing, but I was not expecting much anyway given the conditions I was shooting. For some reason I decided to take a look at it again in LR, still not expecting to be able to “save” this shot. Now I knew that in many instances LR just handles things better than ASP does. But all I can say is wow, what a difference with this shot. LR's noise reduction and demosaicing are far superior to ASP's. Not only was there far less noise showing in the unprocessed shot, cleaning up what remained took seconds and all the detail is still there. I only spent a few minutes in LR getting this shot to look like I wanted it. In ASP, I spent well over an hour trying to accomplish the same thing without very good results. Even pulling the ASP exported .tif into Neat Image didn't help.

All that said, I was pretty convinced that after using LR the last 2 weeks I would not likely use ASP for much of anything anymore. The sewing thread shot fully convinced me that I will not be using ASP at all now.

A couple of things I will miss; the ability to apply nearly any adjustment to a layer and region (LR brushes, though faster and easier than layers and regions, only have so many adjustment options available); Vigne has more options for vignettes, particularly the ability to move the vignette vertically and horizontally; zPerspector is a far better perspective correction tool than the one in LR. Hmm... That's about it really.

I'm getting far better output from LR than ASP, its much faster performing selective edits with LR brushes than struggling through creating layers and regions (seconds compared to minutes or longer for a single region), and a host of other things that make me almost want to reprocess everything I shot over the last 3 years of struggling with B5/ASP. Not to mention that LR is 64 bit and flies on my CoreDuo machine.

In closing, I want to thank all the plug in developers, specifically Ferdinand Paris, tintin, Sean Puckett, and Kbarni. Also AFX for his dedication and support of the user community. This is a train I've been riding for 3 years of hanging on to promises of how great the next update is going to be. It's never been a complete product and now its terribly behind the competition (check out ACDSee Pro 6 for one!). I'm tired of it, its time to change trains. I wish you all the best.

[algreen345]

I wish adobe would port LR to Linux as I would jump in an instant. Of course I like new features, but image quality is more important. Communication with customers is also important. Corel only sends me emails about products they discount that I don't want to buy. They never tell me about features they plan to implement, bugs they will fix, betas I might test. They don't treat us like customers. They treat us with the apathy I expect from government service workers in the port authority bus terminal.

I am increasingly using dark table, but will give 64-bit light room a chance in a windows vm. Thanks for the post.

[Mel]

Here's my reason to say good-bye ASP:

Part of image processed in ASP:

And the same processed in DxO:

Of course, I've spent much more hours than I could afford to get rid of these artifacts, they were visible in PSE 8, GIMP, PSP X4, XnView, etc. so screenshot+conversion to web size is not the culprit. Both were 16-bit tiffs developed with default settings.
-- M.

[binoyte]

@Mel : thanks for these examples.
I'm not the only one with such artefacts ! I thought it was jpeg compression for web but you give me the answer.

[KeithR]

LR's noise reduction and demosaicing are far superior to ASP's.

I've been telling you that for long enough, Chuck...

[KeithR]

@Mel : thanks for these examples.
I'm not the only one with such artefacts ! I thought it was jpeg compression for web but you give me the answer.

Nope, that appears to be exactly the same sort of crappy "transition" artifact that some of us have been complaining about for years - since the Bibble days.

http://support.bibblelabs.com/forums/vi ... ion#p93765
http://support.bibblelabs.com/forums/vi ... ion#p89812
http://support.bibblelabs.com/forums/vi ... ion#p88956

And many more.

[lundbech]

@Mel : thanks for these examples.
I'm not the only one with such artefacts ! I thought it was jpeg compression for web but you give me the answer.

Nope, that appears to be exactly the same sort of crappy "transition" artifact that some of us have been complaining about for years - since the Bibble days.

http://support.bibblelabs.com/forums/vi ... ion#p89812

So you link to an example posted by yourself(?) acouple of years ago, to which a Bibble developer replied: "I'm sorry Keith, I have to strongly disagree with you that the RT image looks better than the Bibble image in any way. If the RT image is your standard of "good" then I'm quite happy that the Bibble image doesn't look like it. To my eyes the Bibble image has better detail, is sharper, has more natural color and has less demosaic artifacts than the RT image. The difference to me is so obvious that it's very difficult for me to take you seriously. To each his own though, use whatever tool gives you the results you're looking for."

Are you serious?