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.

Lightroom 3 new demosaic

It appears the new LR 3 beta includes a new demosaic algorithm and sharpening algorithm. The amount of detail you can extract from the images has gone up by leaps and bounds. You can also go much farther in sharpening than before without the image starting to look like a waterpainting. One nice thing too is that you can also inside LR 3 beta, select the old rendering engine to directly compare. The option is in Develop in the Settings menu, submenu "Process Version". Below is a quick example of the huge difference in detail. This is a scree slope somewhere in Rocky Mountain National Park, so lots and lots of fine detail. The image below shows the LR 2 version. Mouseover for LR 3. You might have to wait a few seconds for the second version to load. Also note that since these are medium-high quality jpegs, some detail is lost in the jpeg conversion.



When I have some time, I'll provide some more analysis. For now, it is looking very very good.

UPDATE: The above image but scaled to 200% Here you see that the new algorithm will really help very large prints (the full image below would correspond to a print of 4x6 feet!. The mouseover version (LR 3) is obviously far better as it doesn't show the weird watercolor effect that you can often get in LR 2.



Here's another example.

On output sharpening

Lightroom 2.0 includes new output sharpening facilities in the export dialog, the print module and the web output module. These are extremely useful. The functionality is to correct for softness induced by the scaling for output and for the softness of the output medium such as a screen or a printing process. Here I'll talk about the use for output images for the web, email, etc. I used the export dialog scaled to 600 points for the long dimension and selected different levels of "screen" sharpening. Here is an example of a waterfall image. See (and buy prints of ;-) )the real image here. You can switch between different output sharpening levels by hovering over the names on top.


unsharpened
low sharpening
standard sharpening
high sharpening


To me, the difference between no sharpening and even just low sharpening is night and day. In the lychen details on the wet rocks for example. You wouldn't notice probably if you just have two images in different contexts, but you would probably thin-slice prefer the slightly sharpened one. The high sharpening is still very good in my opinion and works well for this image.

Here an another example of a cliché truck. This image has lots of sharp detail and you'll see that going to high has a different effect than on the waterfall image.

unsharpened
low sharpening
standard sharpening
high sharpening


Notice the extraordinary amount of extra detail that is pulled out in the hood area by the sharpening. This time, I think high is over the top and the best is probably low or standard. This is quite generally true for images that have man-made structures that have very sharp transitions. In general I have found that using standard gives very good results for most images, but of course this all depends on your taste.

Camera RAW 4.1

Camera Raw 4.1 has just been released and it has a ton of new goodies in it. Here is a very nice overview. I cannot wait for these features to show up in Lightroom. I am intrigued by the new sharpening controls and the clarity slider.