Feedback: Lightroom 4.3 and interactive comparison
chromasoft wrote about his work with X-Trans files. He makes a deep analyze of the RAW conversion for the Fuji X-trans sensor.
But let’s begin with his first impression about the newest version of Lightroom (4.3). chromasoft.blogspot.it is very disappointed and the whole review consists in one laconic sentence: “In short, same chroma smearing problem as the previous versions. Oh dear. Again(!)”
So his hope when he tested the 4.2 version was not fulfilled: “And no, really, you shouldn’t be blaming Adobe for this. They have limited resources, and you can’t expect Adobe to throw huge amounts of R&D time at solving a problem that Fuji created and have taken no action to resolve. The situation may yet improve in LR 4.3; the issue may still get to the top of Adobe’s priority list. But don’t count on it.”
But his analyze is very detailed. Here there are the part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4 of his “demosaicing the X-PRO1” tetralogy.
frontallobbings posted a nice overview of some current options of RAF RAW-conversion. He created an interesting mousover table. Mouse over the links to swap among the others between DCRAW 9.16, Lightroom 4.3, SilkPix Developer Pro 5, In Camera JPG, Raw Photo Processor (RPP 4.7)… He noticed that Lightroom 4.3 has “low amounts of chroma noise, but very heavy detail smearing. Loss of details but no aliasing artifacts. Even at 100% it’s hard to see the ‘Watercolour’ effect if you don’t know what to look for. I suspect a very heavy pre-demosaic median filter and bicubic interpolation algorithm is the cause of the issues. However it’s still one of the easiest to use, and if you can handle some of the image quality loss, most likely won’t notice the detail loss.” DCRAW 9.16: “Gives the highest details, however has aliasing artifacts. Some chroma noise (even after filtering). Command line prompt only. Requires some technical know how. I use VNG interpolation and 15 pass median filtering.” SilkPix Developer Pro 5: “The current version is very clean however does show some chroma smearing. Shows very little chroma noise and no real aliasing errors.” Raw Photo Processor (RPP 4.7): “Utilizes DCRAW and acts as front end. Works very well for details, but aliasing and chroma noise is high.“ Read more in his post here.
Silkypix VS lightroom. Also qimago confirms… silkypix is often better than lightroom. But with silkypix you have to be patient, it’s slow. Lightroom is faster! He dreams of a mix between silkypix and lightroom. Look at the comparison images and read the review here (translated version). You can download the 30 days trial version of silkypix here.