RAW Files & their conversion

[WightWalker]

I've played some more with the RAW converters at my disposal & concluded that Pentax PhotoLab is closer to what might be expected when compared with JPEG - straight out of the camera.

Colours are more accurate with Pentax Photolab - overall sharpness is also better.

Full size image can be viewed here:

http://www.catbells.plus.com/Utilities/RAWComparison.jpg

Colours look smoother with Pentax Photolab, Adobe PhotoShop CS2 comes 2nd, Bibble possibly 3rd with Capure One forth - I couldn't get Capture One to improve on the colours which would have positioned it higher up.

The exercise was worthwhile as I shall be taking my next batch of images in RAW for processing in Pentax PhotoLab

[jeisner]

Photolab does seem the best.. I use Bibble ATM, but I may do some comparisons myself....

[astro]

RAW Shooter looks the most detailed to me. It'd be perfect if the color wasn't off.
The Pentax Photo Lab one looks like there has been some USM done to it.

[WightWalker]

Pentax PhotoLab on Auto seems to work really well & after a days shoot, with over 100 images to process, fine tweaking in Adobe RAW etc would be somewhat time consuming; Pentax PhotLab also has the ability to manually adjust images as well.

I didn't spend too much time trying to get to grips with the other RAW converters so it may well be that given more time, results could be improved over what I achieved.

However, I didn't have to spend any time familiarising myself with Pentax PhotoLab with very acceptable results straight away.

I just processed over 100 shots (took just over 1hr) taken today with my Sigma 28-135mm Macro Zoom lens which I've tended not to use too much as JPEG results always seemed inferior to the Pentax 18-55mm (when comparing like focal lengths). However, looking at the converted JPEG images, I'm much more impressed with the Sigma than I have been previously.

Looks like I'll be using RAW a lot more from now on.

[WightWalker]

If you install the update to v2-1 then notice that RAW converted files look just like JPEGS straight out of the camera.

Personally, I like the output from v2 better than v2-1 even though v2 is slower to convert & crashes when processing large number of images.