This is a difficult task, as emphasizing local contrast tends to produce halos near the horizon, dehazing tends to introduce unpleasant color shifts, and the deep crop necessitates a subtle balance between denoising and detail retention. The challenge is therefore dehazing the mountains, chiseling out the contours with clarity and texture and contrast, and removing any extraneous noise. This lovely scene is a deep crop into an image taken at long distance on a hazy day. This is especially tricky since color shifts in highlights are often baked deeply into the programs' color science, and hard to get rid off where they're unwanted.Īnyway, to my eyes, the only fire-like renderings here come from Capture One, Darktable v5, PhotoLab, and Lightroom. However, there's a flip side to this: Every program that renders yellow highlights in fire, does the same for overexposed skin, twists overexposed skies cyan, and red flowers magenta. ACDSee and ON1 probably take the yellow a bit too far. You can see Darktable v6, DxO PhotoLab, RawTherapee, Exposure, and Zoner leaning towards desaturation, while the others render yellow color twists of some form or another. So a balance has to be struck between merely desaturating highlights, and twisting them yellow. There's a difficult tradeoff to be made here: Fire highlights physically don't change hue much compared to the fire body, but we visibly expect "hotter" fire to twist yellow.
Raising shadows turns background off-blackįujifilm X-Pro2 with XF35mmF1.4 R 1/1000s f/2.2 ISO400📂 DSCF9359.RAF (23.0 MB) Shadows slider not strong enough to show pan
Highlights turn yellow, but lose all definition Pan immediately visible without adjustments Tone EQ very unusual re: shadows/blacks slidersįilmic v5, zero latitude, no color preservation Shadows adjusts unusally far into midtonesįilmic v6, zero latitude, no color preservation My editing goals for this picture are simple: raise shadows or blacks until the pan becomes faintly visible, and reign in highlights if necessary to prevent excessive clipping. In particular, we seem to expect highlights to twist to yellow, and midtones to remain orange. Thus a more yellow rendering usually suits fire very well, whereas a more neutral rendering quickly looks unnatural.
Don't try this at home, folks!įire is notoriously difficult to deal with, because it covers a large dynamic range, and we have strong associations of certain colors with heat. Regardless, my comparison is probably less scientific than last time, because my brain sort of broke after staring at too many renderings of the same images for too long. I tried to inject some objectivity by limiting my edits to the most obvious sliders wherever possible, especially in the programs I know better. Of course I am no expert in any of them except Darktable and Capture One, so my results are probably flawed. In order to put them through their paces, I took a random smattering of images from the last few years that I found difficult to work with for one reason or another, and checked how each of the programs dealt with them. I also installed Luminar Neo (€120 or €80/a) and Radiant Photo (€140) but I disliked them so immediately and viscerally that I didn't include them in the comparison below.
#IRIDIENT DEVELOPER RAF COMPRESSED SUPPORT PRO#
Or maybe I just wanted a justification for buying DxO PhotoLab, because people on the internet speak so well of it 🙄.įor the following comparison I downloaded trial versions of ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2023 (€155), Capture One 22 (€350 or €220/a), Darktable 4.0 (free), DxO Photolab 6 (€220 + €140 for FilmPack 6 + €99 for ViewPoint), Adobe Lightroom Classic 11.5 (€142/a), ON1 Photo Raw 2023 (€126), RawTherapee 5.8 (free), Silkypix Developer Studio Pro 11 (€155), Exposure X7 (€165), and Zoner Photo Studio X Fall 2022 (€60/a). This comes at an inopportune time, as I feel restless of late. It's that time of the year again when all image editing programs come out with new versions.
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