Lightroom bad highlight rendering

Lightroom 3 (I am using 3.2 RC) has some superb rendering nowadays. Lots of detail, pleasing grain behavior, great noise reduction and more. I am generally very happy with it. There is one area where it can use more work and I am not the only one to think that. I ran into this again recently in the below shot of a glassblower at a county fair. If you mouse over this image, you will see the rendering of the same raw file that is obtained from Nikon's capture NX. Pay attention to the flame.





Mouse over this link to see the image using the Adobe Standard profile

Clearly, Nikon's capture does a far better job creating a smooth transition in the highlight area of this image. The Lightroom version has two ugly posterized step transitions in it. Clearly it is not dealing well with areas that are blown out in one or more channels of the raw file. If you try different camera profiles in LR, you will get different highlight posterization but none as good as the Nikon Capture example. This is also often observed in images of setting suns and such where you will often see a weird halo around the sun. This is the same thing as was observed in the article I linked to above.
Of course, I would not want to do lots of work in Capture NX as that program has a horrid interface and I do not always like the color rendering, but clearly this is an area where Lightroom/ACR could improve.

EDIT: I added a mouse over link to show the image when using Adobe's Standard profile. It is better than the other profiles Adobe offers or one created using the profile editor or the Passport software, but it still does not do as smooth a highlight as Nikon's software.

EDIT 2/5/11. This issue has now been fixed by Adobe.

Lightroom noise reduction revisited

A while ago, I wrote a post about noise reduction in Lightroom and how it compares to in-camera jpegs or capture NX (for Nikons) at very high ISOs. At that time, I concluded that Lightroom's noise reduction was weak. Over time however, I have come to appreciate the flipside of this coin. Both jpegs and capture NX conversions lose enormous amounts of detail because of the noise reduction applied. So much so that it can severely impact your image and make it look like it came from a point and shoot digital camera (i.e. terrible). To illustrate, here are some examples of this effect. I am employing the same rollover trick again as I have used before. Just roll your mouse over the titles and your browser will fetch that specific version. Be patient, depending on your connection, the first time this can take a few seconds to appear. After that, it will be instantaneous.


Capture NX default conversion
Lightroom default conversion
Capture NX with no noise reduction


And here is a different area.

Capture NX default conversion
Lightroom default conversion
Capture NX with no noise reduction


In my opinion, in both these examples, the default capture NX conversion pastes over lots of actual detail. I think the LR method actually gives a nice middle point between the images with noise reduction disabled in CNX and the ones with the default noise reduction. In the house image for example, the noise reduction completely gets rid of the structure in the fence, which is still visible in the Lightroom conversion. I do not like the appearance of the noise in Lightroom too much though. It seems to have a pasty character. Of course you should avoid looking this close too much at these superhigh ISO images. Of course a dedicated noise-reduction program will probably do a far better job than either. You can also see that although I used a camera-matching profile for the Lightroom conversions to give the same color as CNX, the yellow highlights on the house are not rendered as well in Lightroom as in CNX.

Lightroom 2.0

Lightroom 2.0 was released yesterday and I immediately downloaded the upgrade even though I have been very very busy with other things. Let me say that I am quite astonished by the release even though I knew what was to be expected in this. Just a list of things I was hoping for and whether they are in LR 2:

- electronic grad ND filters: One of the few reasons I have to go to Photoshop stil and a very longheld wish of mine. check
- Paint-in adjustment masks for exposure, sharpening, saturation, etc. check
- export to arbitrary color profiles in the export dialog: check
- pervasive output sharpening: check And it is superb!
- Better color rendering for reds, yellows, and oranges: check if you use the beta camera profiles. More on this later and why this is so exciting.
- Print to jpeg: check! It now even copies over the copyright notice into the metadata!
- Better file organization: check

Stuff that didn't make the cut but that I'd really love to see:
- Soft proofing. Obviously this is a major wish. This is hard to get right though.
- Book making facility. This is one area where Aperture really shines.
- Built-in backup facility.

About the new DNG profiles. I think this is a major advance that cannot be underestimated in its importance. Lightroom and ACR always had this issue where you could not get both skin tones and reds and yellows right at the same time without resorting to tricks. These new profiles provide beautiful colors and provide color rendering (if you like that) very close to the camera jpeg.

Here is an example: Young photographer loves colorful flowers:

This is the ACR 4.4 default rendering:


This is what people complain about. Ugly skintones, dull yellows and reds, etc. In this case, the image appears underexposed too, which it really wasn't

Compare this to the default Capture NX rendering (same as the camera jpeg)


As you can see, far better skin tones and more accurate yellow.

This is the rendering with the camera default beta profile:


That is superb. Great skintones and beautiful yellow. The yellow is actually nicer than in the CNX image.

Now to really optimize this, I used the camera vivid profile and increased the vibrance and saturation to 10 to get this image:


This really exemplifies the almost fluorescent quality these flowers had in real life. It also gives the nice warm tones that were present in the sunset light, even when using the daylight white balance! The difference with the ACR4.4 rendering is stunning. I'd recommend anybody to download the new profiles and try them out! I have to stress here that apart from slightly nicer reds and yellows, it makes very little difference for my D300. The difference with my older D50 (images above) are very large as you can clearly see.

Unwrapping a fisheye image

One of the fun features of using a fisheye lens is its enormous distortion that disproportionally enlarges foreground elements. I own the Nikon 10.5 mm fisheye for DX cameras. After my wideangle was destroyed because of a car that drove over my backpack recently, I was forced to use it more often with my camera that had a defunctive commanddial because of the same incident. Also, since my new D300 included a license for Capture NX, I can now easily unwrap fisheye images. You can do this too for free with hugin, but this is much easier - just a single click. As an example here is my daughter taking a picture of me in Arizona with the fisheye:

I'm always amazed at the beautiful creamy skintones that this program and the in-camera jpeg engine gives. You have to work on this in other RAW converters (not just Lightroom). Anyway, here is the rectilinear projection.

Pretty cool. In this case, I think I prefer the fisheye image anyway, but it is a good illustration.

High ISO noise in Lightroom and Capture NX

Together with the new D300 came a free copy of Capture NX, Nikon's dedicated RAW converter software. Apparently Nikon wants to push the use of this program. First, after trying it a little let me say that this program still has by far the worst user interface of anything I have ever encountered. In its current form it is a major disaster. The side panels are horribly designed and the way everything works is designed as an 80's X-windows program. Horrifying to say the least. What Nikon does know very well is how to deal with the data coming from their cameras. By default it gives great color and contrast. One other thing it does well is high-ISO noise. I shot the following image at ISO 6400 with the D300 and loaded it as a .NEF in both Lightroom (2.0 beta) and Capture NX. This is the default conversion (the camera was set to Vivid picture style and Capture picks that up, Vivid adds some saturation some sharpening and some contrast)



You see this camera is usable at this ISO. There is a little noise in the dark blue sky but pretty nice. Amazing how far this has come, the image is better than film at ISO 800. Now for some 100% comparisons. This is Capture default conversion



Pretty amazing if you ask me. The noise is very grain like as if it is film.
Now Lightroom. Left, default Lightroom conversion, right optimized noise reduction (about 50/50 in both luminance and chroma)


As you see, Lightroom's conversion is far noisier by default and it is typical digital noise. The more optimized conversion is still noisy and becomes splotchy. Not very good. You also see strange speckling around the lights in both images that is not present in the Capture conversion.

Conclusion: Not surprising since the software comes from the camera maker, Capture NX deals very well with high ISO noise. If only the program were not so horrible in its use that I dread opening it every time, I would use it all the time and import tiffs or jpegs into Lightroom from it.

EDIT: because of a request below, I added the Mac OS X (i.e. identical to Aperture - my trial license for Ap 2 expired) default system RAW library conversion. It looks like this:


Very similar to Lightroom default version but not as good as Capture NX's. Somehow the noise seems to be a little more even than in the Lightroom conversion, so perhaps it would be easier to deal with, but I digress.