Comments on: Some Raw programs are more equal than others

By: Craig Cacchioli - Wedding Photographer

Craig Cacchioli - Wedding Photographer — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 18:09:25 +0000

An interesting insight. Obviously, different software has different tricks, but I never expected to see such a marked difference!

By: Ryan Brenizer — New York City Wedding Photographer : For You Blue

Ryan Brenizer — New York City Wedding Photographer : For You Blue — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:08:54 +0000

[...] More extreme white balance? Nope — this is exactly what the scene looked like in real life, thanks to the crazy night lights at the High Line. [...]

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 08:38:51 +0000

Ryan – Dealing with the white balance is always something hard for me. Could share some handy hints about what “simple adjustment” you did in NX to get this awesome skin tone out of the sluggish enlightenment.
Love your new blog too btw.

By: Simon

Simon — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:06:09 +0000

Thanks so much for this Ryan, this is the one problem with LR for me…View NX works way better for those rare shots where LR fails. Now if Nikon would only make it work faster and not charge extra for NX2 I’d be much happier.
Love the new blog BTW, long-time fan of your Amazon blog…

By: Dolly

Dolly — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:13:54 +0000

I absolutely love this post. Those pictures of the background are my absolute favorite.

By: Ryan Brenizer

Ryan Brenizer — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 04:59:17 +0000

Thank you Maria! Your comment is a bit hard to understand because of the language barrier, but in terms of absolute quality I will usually go with NX, with photoshop for fine detail work.

By: Maria

Maria — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 04:25:05 +0000

Hi!, you always use Lightroom for editing because I´m your fan and I tried Aperture, photoshop and NX2, but always finish some effect in photoshop, If don´t edit a lot of photos which program do you say that is the best for more quality (forget the speed) and the photo before the aperture edit is finished in NX2 ? but started in Lightroom?

—I love you Ryan (your work) you inspired me-

By: Sean McCormack

Sean McCormack — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:42:32 +0000

Steven Erat sent me over for a look.

Using the DNG Profile Editor you can quite easily make a much cooler white balance and save it as a profile.

I use this technique for Infrared, but it would work equally as well in this application.

http://lightroom-blog.com/2009/05/creating-ir-camera-profile.html

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:21:29 +0000

“That’s because you’re working the JPEG image that I already got halfway there.”

Actually, I tried the dropper on the first image, not the second one that had already been processed in LR. Thanks for the update in Aperture though.

By: Kyle

Kyle — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:24:45 +0000

Going to see what Canon’s program has to offer as far as white balance goes. Skin toes are my achilles tendon.

And YAY, Ryan has a blog we can all comment on!

By: Ryan Brenizer

Ryan Brenizer — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:05:33 +0000

I’ve never had LR’s dropper go extreme.

By: Thomas Lester

Thomas Lester — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:16:05 +0000

Hey Ryan -

I’m an Aperture user and am aware of the dropper being able to go extreme (off the sliders). However… as you can see in your sample, Aperture gets the temperature pretty close, but seems to almost always screw up the tint. I almost always have to re-adjust the tint even when using a grey card target. And it’s not always consistent. Sometimes it’s heavy on the pink side, sometimes it’s heavy on the green side.

Did you try the dropper in LR? I would think that it would behave similarly to Aperture.

BTW… I love Capture NX2, but I just can’t wrap my head around an efficient work flow since CNX2 stinks for Digital Asset Management and it’s SLLLOOOWWWW….

By: kw

kw — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:09:41 +0000

Aperture is truly a great program. I’ve been using it for long time for processing both nikon and canon files. It’s too bad people don’t see the power of Aperture and what it has to offer. With Nik plugins I never have to go to photoshop much anymore. Never used Nikon nx or Capture NX 2. I have used LR and much prefer Aperture. Just my two cents.
K-

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:52:01 +0000

Nice comparison! I found out last year that Lightroom’s temperature settings aren’t sufficiently low enough especially for specialized infrared work.

One solution, albeit clunky for the type of corrections you suggest in this blog, would be to be to create a custom camera profile for use in Lightroom to get extreme colour temperatures (i.e. for good IR photos I need a temperature in the range of 1600-1800K) – here’s a discussion I started on flickr about this:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/55027594@N00/discuss/72157606449595202/

Once again, clunky to do, and not precise, but there is a way to get extreme colour temperatures in Lightroom by building your own camera profiles.

By: Ryan Brenizer

Ryan Brenizer — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:44:49 +0000

Just out of curiousity, what is your most commonly used Raw prog? Your pictures always have perfect skin tone!

Overall, Lightroom by far because of the incredible speed. But the photos presented o the blog are a split between Lightroom and NX.

By: Max

Max — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:01:12 +0000

This is a really good post – getting good colours especially skin tones) in lightroom has been almost impossible for me so its good to see that other programs can really do much better. LR is so bad that I started to get seriously paranoid about shooting under fluourescent light!

Just out of curiousity, what is your most commonly used Raw prog? Your pictures always have perfect skin tone!

By: Ryan Brenizer

Ryan Brenizer — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 05:58:54 +0000

@Greg: View the update!

By: Ryan Brenizer

Ryan Brenizer — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 05:51:31 +0000

It’s not often I run across someone more pedantic than myself. ;-)

By: kwb

kwb — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:44:19 +0000

And, it’s “Raw” instead of “RAW.” Check any Adobe manual. Raw is not an acronym. Otherwise, nice.

By: Greg

Greg — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:29:04 +0000

Good info. do you have a feel for what Apple’s Aperture can do as a comparison?

Thx,

Greg

By: Ryan Brenizer

Ryan Brenizer — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:14:11 +0000

That’s because you’re working the JPEG image that I already got halfway there. Adobe is a bit more wild with their JPG white balance, since it’s a different scale. But the Lightroom image was at the maximum settings (2000K, -150)

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 03:43:15 +0000

Ryan,

Did you try using the white balance dropper tool on the guy’s shirt collar in the bottom left of the frame?

I tried it with your JPEG image and think it turned out closer to balanced than the second shot above. I didn’t get the warm skin tones like on the bottom shot, but I think I could get more out of the NEF file in Lightroom. Her teeth also worked pretty good with the dropper tool.