Thursday, October 22, 2009

More detail

Warning: extreme pixelpeeping alert! You are not going to see any difference if you don't print extremely large.

Now I've give you the disclaimer, I want to say that I am really quite impressed with the new demosaic in Lightroom. I posted one example before where you could see the subtle effect that made the LR 3 images look more natural and allow for larger prints. Here is another example where instead of using the same sharpening settings, I tried to optimize both the LR 2 and the LR 3 version. It is not possible to get the LR 2 version to show anywhere near as much detail as the LR 3 version. The LR 3 version also looks far more natural and less fake. Surprisingly, you can even see the effect a little bit in the scaled down version that I use below as a placeholder. Full-res version in the link where you can really see the difference.



Of course, the left is LR 2 and the right LR 3

Edit: David Naylor comes to very similar conclusions on his blog.

Edit 2: This is the lower right corner of a frame shot using the ultracheap Nikon 18-55 mm kit lens. Parameters: Nikon D300, 18-55mm f3.5-5.6, ISO 200, f8, 1/60 s, handheld. It always amazes me how sharp this cheapo lens can be.

3 comments:

  1. I'm uncertain if this does yeild more detail in the green needles (spruce?) or simply some better sharpening at about 0.3 pixel radius

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  2. The sharpening on both images had the same radius of 0.8. The difference is really coming from the demosaic.

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  3. Very interesting! The new engine really is much better! Now if I only had bigger walls at home ... :)

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