Which RAW converter do you think is best?

With that said, I still prefer C1SE. The program allows you to keeping working on files while it is doing the conversions in the background. Saves a lot of time.
I can never seem to get good colors out of PS CS. I wish that they would correct this problem.

This choice I have struggled with for the past couple of months. In my use, CS has real issues with color management, e.g. snow shouldn't have a green cast. If it were consistent it would be less of a problem but it doesn't appear to be consistent, at least in my applications on a PC. BB has been my choice, but there are some areas where either it's not convenient or it's relatively slow. I expressed my irritation elsewhere about C1 pricing for the 1Ds relative to the 10D, but when the SE version came out I broke down and gave it a try. I'm not sure that it's a tremendous improvement in accuracy over BB, which is a great value, but once you get the hang of it the workflow with C1 it actually is much quicker, at least the way I use it. Watching Chas go through and process an image with C1 was a real eye-opener!

(Now if C1 would just let me rotate the image by an arbitrary value to correct for tilted horizons I would be in "hog heaven!")

Rich

I wonder if BB will get a speed enhancement when the new Canon program comes out? If Chris incorperates the new Canon conversion program into BB we might have a wonderful program that doesn't have the speed limitation. Food for thought.

Converted with program as marked. Both at standard settings with a custom white balance clicked off the same spot. No sharpening on either, no adjustment after the white balance. I personally like the blue better in ACRII.

Like I said I could get both to look exactly the same given a bit of effort so I don't view it as a negative toward either program. They just react differently under different circumstances.

Conversion of snow photos has been no problem in ACRII for me. See my post in the Digital/EOM forum.

Will, Chuck Westfall was very evasive about the new Canon software supporting anything but the "1" series. It would be too bad if Chris couldn't have access to the new DLL's, but it's really up in the air right now.

Well they are certainly hyping the new software with claims such as 5x improvement in RAW conversion speed. Even if its half true, we could be in for a surprise but previous history has me very skeptical

The fact that it is not supposed to support CRW files is too bad as the 10D is probably going to be my second-most used camera.

Wil, I remember the results posted before and the C1 does look better and sharper (sharper more than anything else) compared to the BB conversion and the ACR one. I could not mimic these results with the trial version, which is now expired. If I could start the trial over maybe I would have more time to work with it, but it doesn't look like I can.

Dan, I like the BB version of the flag much better, and on my monitor it's more than subtle. The blue on the ACR version looks unnatural to me.

Greg Downing wrote:The fact that it is not supposed to support CRW files is too bad as the 10D is probably going to be my second-most used camera.

Dan, I like the BB version of the flag much better, and on my monitor it's more than subtle. The blue on the ACR version looks unnatural to me.

Really, on my monitor the BB conversion looks a bit magenta.?
The ACR looks Velvia blue.
Prints the same way too.

The BB might look ever so slightly magenta but the other one looks ELECTRIC. It could be my monitor though...

Dan and Greg,
For what it's worth, I see much cleaner whites in the white stripes of Old Glory in the ACRII version of the shot. I also agree with Dan about too much red/magenta in the BB version.
Mike Stolting
P.S. You may want to discount anything I say about this subject since I use the Canon Fileviewer Utility that came with my 10D.

I see a magenta cast in the BB version as well. The whites in the ACR version look much better.

FWIW monitors surely vary but taking the images into PS and sampling the whites on the flag neither of the images sample even close to neutral!

As far as the blue I can only tell you that my eyes see the ACR version as much more unnatural than the BB version. The only way I can describe it is that the sky in the ACR version looks over-polarized to me. Also there is more apparent darkening in the corners in the ACR version than in the BB version. Neither conversion is perfect and both look to have color balance problems that need to be adjusted in PS.

Better whites plus vivid blues make sense from a color shift point of view. A blue shift would sure kill the magenta.

Greg Downing wrote:As far as the blue I can only tell you that my eyes see the ACR version as much more unnatural than the BB version.

You must have some weird-looking skies up there in North America...

Here's a vote for the ACR version not looking "wrong". Sure the blue is strong, but might this just be a saturation issue. Or maybe the shot was actually taken against pollution and/or sunset and the magenta is accurate. But my short answer is I prefer the ACR version.
I'm not saying that it's 100% accurate, but I prefer it given those two options.

I've never seen a sky that saturated in nature, so maybe that is the issue. That being said I seem to be in the minority so maybe it's time to adjust my monitor.

FWIW here is what I am used to seeing blue skies look like:
If this looks natural to anyone please let me know. Now looking at this side by side with Dan's converted files both of his files look off to my eye in terms of overall color balance (as I stated in my last post), so it doesn't really say anything for either conversion program. if you ask me.

Greg- Your images always seem to look fine and if you haven't had a color management complaint from where it matters, clients, don't change a thing. I'm not going to let this affect my workflow because I've had good success and I think my images always look good when done.

I think what is important to note here is that this was just a one click conversion. No further adjustments from either programs default. I should have mentioned too that the original image was taken with a polarizer. It was just a recent image I took that had blue skies. In my experience even after conversion there is at least a touch more work that has to be done in Photoshop to ge a finished product and that being the case I'd always take the conversion that gets me there the quickest and that is usually the one with the cleanest colors straight out of conversion. Sometimes that is Breezebrowser, sometimes it ACR. No doubt by April it may be Canon's new software.
A one click adjustment of a non-polarized somewhat similar sky image in ACRII. Greg- just for my own sanity, and faith in my ACR workflow, does the blue, even though somewhat darker in comparison, look unnatural here?
Adjusted with curves in Photoshop to represent a finished image.

This is interesting to say the least. I know we're going to learn something out of this. What exactly I'm not sure yet. Perhaps that color management still has a long way to go. Or perhaps color is still subjective with color management in place?

Looking at the images of BB & ARC both have their good points and weaknesses. The main issue here seems to be color cast and oversaturation. Both are easily remedied. What BB has in its favor IMHO is cost.

I know this is not a clever question.I use jpeg in my canon 10d(and adjust everything in ps) as I read
there was little difference between raw and jpegs.Is this true?.I have breeze B.Shoud I start shooting raw ?

miguel lasa wrote:I know this is not a clever question.I use jpeg in my canon 10d(and adjust everything in ps) as I read
there was little difference between raw and jpegs.Is this true?.I have breeze B.Shoud I start shooting raw ?

There is a difference. For photojournalism work though I only shoot in jpeg as quality is not the primary issue and the images would have absolutely no advantage being shot in RAW. For the quality of newspaper images you wouldn't see any difference in an image whatsoever.

Dan, the blue sky in the goose images look 1000% better than the ones with the flag, and much perfectly natural to me. The final version almost matches my shot exactly. Looking at them next to the flag images you can see why I thought those looked over the top.

As far as the differences between RAW and JPEG there are quality differences, but more importantly is the ability to make adjustments such as white balance, before the final conversion. If shooting in JPEG it is best to immediately save your images to a lossless format, such as TIFF or PSD, rather than saving to a lossy format such as JPEG. Still, there is much more tonal information contained in a file that is converted from RAW. I agree it makes little difference in small files, such as those used for the web or in a newspaper, as long as you have the white balance and other settings correct at the time you pressed the shutter.