Battle of the century - Rawshooter Vs DPP

[ricphoto]

Well, everyone wants to talk about it, so I decided to do some tests myself and here are the results :)
I work for a variety of modified car magazines and after several months being an avid fan of Pixmantic Rawshooter, I figured some back to back testing with DPP was in order.

Right then, let's start with the exact same RAW file, converted with NO twiddling of sliders or curves or anything ... just a straight conversion to 8bit TIFF.

Rawshooter has produced a slightly paler, perhaps green tinged image of this 30-second on-a-tripod exposer with NO noise reduction in the camera and parameter 1 i.e no enhancement to saturation / sharpness etc.

DPP has decided to produce a red tinged TIFF from the same RAW file.
Make of this what you will.

[ricphoto]

OK, now let's go in for a couple of 100% grabs ....
The DPP image is the grainy one, but clearly, the leather pleats in the upholstery have a lot more detail than RSE.
I have to admit that I've applied about 25 of Rawshooter's noise reduction slider, so clearly, that is 'smoothing' some fine detail away.

[ricphoto]

So I went back and knocked the noise slider in Rawshooter back to zero and got this ...

[Scottes]

Running with the defaults is not a very good test at all. Who knows what the defaults are set to? Perhaps one is set for a noisy underexposed image and the other favors a noise-free overexposed image. You really have to test both by producing the best possible conversion that you can do. This test is meaningless.

[ricphoto]

However, the one test that has me convinced that I am staying with Rawshooter is this.
These 100% grabs of the license plate were taken from another shot in bright late afternoon sunlight.
Again, no messing around with sliders or that ... just straight conversions to 8-bit TIFFs.
Anybody want to lay down a bet as to which one came from which processor:)
Yep, Rawshooter wins hands down for absoloute clairty and sharpness and I absoloutely swear that there has been no sharpening applied either in Rawshooter or photoshop

[ricphoto]

That's fair enough Scottes, I hear what you are saying ...
But I still reckon Rawshooter offers the best 'Out Of The Box' conversion.
The only downside I've noticed with Rawshooter is the colours don't seem correct at times, but with some colour knowledge it's not hard to fix in Photoshop.
The initial clarity and sharpness of Rashooter has me convinced though and it's a more 'tuneable' package than DPP.
That's my choice, just thought others might be curious, that's all :)

[ricphoto]

And come to think of it .... Default settings ?
Both programmes open the RAW file as they 'see' it.
In Rawshooter, for example, any RAW file is opened with an 'as the camera sees it' white balance to begin with and that's what DPP does too.
Neither programme has any 'default' sharpening at this stage or anything else I can see for that matter.
I've simply made a comparison from these basic levels and I think Rawshooter wins befor you even begin to tweak and twiddle.

[cyclone]

Just to clarify on RSE, was sharpening set to 0 or -40? At the 0 level there is some sharpening applied unless the apply no sharpening box is checked.

Thanks for looking at these two programs. Maybe you could post some more comparisons.

Cyclone

[ricphoto]

I should clarify that in all instances, no sharpening was applied in RSE.
By this I mean that the slider was left at 0 and the little box on the other page was NOT ticked - I delberately un-ticked it.
This has convinced me that Rawshooter produces a clearer, sharper conversion to begin with

[cyclone]

OK I just looked and it is an 'apply sharpening' box, not 'apply no sharpening.' My memory must be going!