Vida de Fotógrafa

Note: This article was written for a photography site in July, so, that’s why the information here is a bit outdated. I already upgraded to LR3 and added some changes to my raw workflow.

I’ll say something, I have been always on the skeptical side of “you should only convert your RAW files using native camera software”. Reinaldo Mandacaru is one such great advocate of this practice, and I didn’t listen for quite a while. Now I am starting my test drive of Adobe’s new Lightroom 3 Workflow software. And there are many improvements, and I heard, great improvements on the ACR ( Adobe Camera RAW – their inhouse RAW conversion software of choice, one I have been faithful to for quite a while ), so, it was worth a real comparison test.

Anyone who knows me, knows I’m sometimes around the house making experiments with lights and food. Sometimes it works, many times it won’t, but will give me enough insight on how lighting works, or should work, that will help me develop my style further. I keep saying a good photographer must have iron on her spine, to withstand the pressure of the world, not on her head, to prevent free thinking. We learn as much from failures as we do from success. It’s a rule. Set in stone. Just, most photographers tend to like to fail in private and keep it to themselves, while I say I constantly test at home, in private, fail at home, in private, but see no shame on saying “This is a test, I learned this and that” in case it might be useful to someone else. That’s the whole spirit of the strobist community I guess.

To put it to the test, I did the simplest thing imaginable. I would simply let LR3 work the CR2 images from my Canon40D, while at the same time, exporting those from Canon’s own RAW processing software, Digital Photo Professional (DPP) as 16bit TIFF files. And compare what LR3 did in terms of conversion, with what DPP did. Side by side, at 100%.

In simple terms, the in focus pieces of the photo are showed stronger colors on the LR3 conversion, compared to DPP, but when we come to dark areas, shadows and out of phocus, DPP showed a much better conversion, overall.

While LR tried to make sense of the RAW data by sometimes creating artifacts and moving towards a middle-ground, blotting the shadow areas, DPP simply depicted the exact RAW data, faulty as it may be, but giving much darker darks, and overall, a better data to work with ( considering this is an APS-C sensor, not Full Frame ). Also, color details are much better on the DPP version, even if, at a first, non-100% view, the impression would be that LR3 rendered better tones to the pie. It’s possibly just the fact LR3 renders the RAW images on the ProPhoto color profile, while DPP exports as sRGB for all I could tell ( will have to look into it from now on ).

Here you can see, side by side. Anyone with a good eye and a well calibrated monitor should be able to see what I’m talking about. There will be more tests to be done in the future, and be sure that I will experiment more.

But, for now, I can say this. I will upgrade from LR2 towards LR3 at the end of the trial period. Actually, a bit before, I just want to have it next month on the credit card as opposed to this one. This month I’d just upgrade LR, while next month I’ll be able to upgrade LR2 and CS4 to LR3 and CS5 at a discount. But from now on, my RAW workflow will include an early conversion of all photos using DPP, before I jump into LR and Photoshop for selection and post-processing.

Will keep you all posted on how it goes

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