Why do we all end up using Lightroom?

Keith R wrote in post #17150340
To be honest Tony, I'm going to steer clear of that, but I'll explain why - and why I pointedly said in my earlier post that "at the moment I find Capture One's high ISO noise handling clearly superior to Lr's".

It's because if you'd asked me the same question a few months back, I was using a different camera - I'm using a 70D now, whereas I was using a 7D - and would have given Lightroom the nod over Capture One.

I'm of the opinion that something is actually broken in the current Lightroom 70D "profile", and the results I'm getting from the 70D in Lr reflect neither the capabilities of the camera nor Lr's usual - excellent - standard of noise handling.

In fact, it looks to me like Lr is rendering the 70D's files using the old PV 2003 (the original demosaicing/NR algorithms, which I hated with a passion in Lr pre release 4), rather than PV 2012, even though PV 2012 is selected.

So my current opinion is a "conditional" one, and one subject to probable change when the next release of Lr emerges. It'd be unfair for me to start posting up examples of Lr's "unacceptable" high ISO noise handling when past experience tells me that they're not typical.

Suffice to say though, at lower ISOs, Lr is still excellent: any images in this post with a larger "signature" are courtesy of Lr, and they look pretty damn' good to me...

Ah, Keith that's very interesting about the 70D profile being off, it will definitely be interesting to see what upcoming releases do with that!

I can definitely see some folks getting "turned off" by that even if it's a temporary "bug" that's due to be fixed. Those of us who have been familiar with Lightroom over the years have seen bugs pop up since the development team for ACR has been quite active in trying to implement stuff and often their early "beta" attempts have been buggy, but they also work hard to fix stuff that does pop up, I have as a whole been quite impressed at the work they've done.

All that being said though, I've always discouraged "newbies" from just jumping into Lightroom since there is so much more than the ACR Raw developer, I for one have been a proponent of starting out with DPP and Photoshop Elements, getting the fundamentals down, and then taking a careful look at more sophisticated apps like Lightroom, look before you leap!

kirkt wrote in post #17150290
The thread with nathancarter's very red images is interesting, but what is it really "testing"? What is the "correct" result? It is an interesting exercise, but that's about it. It is a very challenging image from a technical and creative standpoint, but one can open that DNG in pretty much any raw converter and output something that one can declare is an "acceptable" image. Mostly because if you know how to convert raw images with the tools you have, you can convert it.

Inclined to agree. It really tests the ability of the software user more than anyone else (I tried and gave up, unable to get anywhere near as good a result from the DNG out of Capture One as has already been posted! )

In the interests of balance, I'll also point out that while Capture One will convert a DNG happily enough, you'll never get the result you would have got from the original Raw - Capture One will automatically load its "Default DNG" profile, and the likelihood that it will match the colour profile that would have been loaded for the orginal Raw is very low.

As Phase One puts it:

In short, in Capture One, colour management and handling of DNGs is - to be kind - challenging, so a test which involves converting a DNG puts Capture One at an inherent disadvantage.

Of course, this might be said to be another advantage of Lightroom over Capture One.

Does C1 allow the selection of alternate profiles so that the default could be manually changed to a camera appropriate ICC profile?

Because - y'know - this whole thread is based on a preposterous premise, I thought I'd just reference this post in the 70D thread as an example of the "terrible failings" of Lightroom in IQ terms:
https://photography-on-the.net …p=17151575&post​count=7390

Why do we put up with it?

tzalman wrote in post #17151584
Does C1 allow the selection of alternate profiles so that the default could be manually changed to a camera appropriate ICC profile?

Yep, one of the good things about Capture One is that you can use literally any profile in the library against any image opened in it.

I do this quite a lot as a matter of course, because sometimes I like the slightly more subtle colour rendering of (say) the 5D Mk II profile over the more "in your face" colours provided by the default 7D and 70D profiles (these being the cameras I use).

An advantage to Capture One there..!

Although Adobe are trying to push DNG as the one RAW format, I have always refrained from converting to DNG. I remember a time when converted DNG's were only supported on Adobe products. Although several other RAW converters were DNG compatible, they were only compatible with DNG files produced directly by cameras. It seems that this situation, although it may be better, is still limiting the usefulness of converted DNG files. I suppose that the fact that C1 allows you to select any camera profile that you want is helpful, you still need to know that you have to make that change manually.

Alan

I keep trying to use Lightroom and give it up.

You can make any camera profile in ACR/LR useable with your camera model if you don't mind the command line and a text editor. dcptool allows you to decompile a DCP file into human readable XML. At or near the end of the file is a tag for the camera model associated with the particular DCP. This is called the "Unique Camera Identifier" or something similar. It's been a while since I did this.

Anyway, if you decompile and open a DCP file for your camera you can see the camera identifier ACR/LR expects in a DCP file for your camera. Copy that camera identifier exactly and, after you decompile DCPs for other camera models, you can replace the camera identifier tag in those profiles with your camera identifier - recompile the edited DCP and save it with a useful name like "Nikon D800 for Canon 5D2".

It should be available for your camera after you restart ACR/LR.

This assumes you put the DCP in the correct location on your computer, that is, you have some general knowledge about DCPs.

Hack away!

Kirk

You can, Kirk - but with Capture One, they're just right there, which makes life much easier.

Yep. Just passing along information!

Kirk

Sure thing - me too..!

Keith R wrote in post #17151491
Inclined to agree. It really tests the ability of the software user more than anyone else (I tried and gave up, unable to get anywhere near as good a result from the DNG out of Capture One as has already been posted! )

In the interests of balance, I'll also point out that while Capture One will convert a DNG happily enough, you'll never get the result you would have got from the original Raw - Capture One will automatically load its "Default DNG" profile, and the likelihood that it will match the colour profile that would have been loaded for the orginal Raw is very low.

As Phase One puts it:


In short, in Capture One, colour management and handling of DNGs is - to be kind - challenging, so a test which involves converting a DNG puts Capture One at an inherent disadvantage.

Of course, this might be said to be another advantage of Lightroom over Capture One.

The Capture One processing that someone posted on NathanCarter's red light thread did ultimately look the most true to color, but NathanCarter told us he's going to put the original CR2 files up for us to play with instead of the DNG files. So we'll have another go-around at it when he does that.

And, quietly, Phase One have just released CaptureOne v.8.

http://www.phaseone.co​m …wnload-Capture-One-8.aspx

It would appear they are very serious about competing with Adobe and forcing the issue. And the free trial is **60** days.

kirk

Thanks Kirk. I'll give it a spin....or 60 spins.

Hey, this is really funny. They are offering a choice of full purchase or monthly subscription.
Competing with Adobe, indeed.