Lightroom weak compared to Capture One and DxO?

[lars69]

Hi everybody,

 

I am currently searching for the best software solution for me if I have to

convert a lot of RAW images into reasonably good JPGs without much time to spend

but when quality should still be good. So I am not talking about my one-off

dream shot for a poster at home but let?s say 100 images I want to print the day

after shooting.

 

I downloaded trial versions of Lightroom, DxO Pro and Capture One to test.

From the Workflow I really love Lightroom, takes time to get used to but it?s

nice. Plus it is fast to work with, I can still customize (crop, enhance?) every

image without spending too much time. I then use the export to image function to

create high resolution JPG or TIFF files, as I have dedicated printer software

the build-in printing is no good for me.

 

But I took a serious of images at deliberately bad but possible conditions

(ISO1600, f2.8 on a Canon EOS 10D) and converted all of them in all three

programs. I used minimal noise reduction at first and then played around with

the settings.

 

So I found that Lighroom is fastest to convert, even though my PC is very

outdated it still converts each image in a few seconds. Capture One needs almost

30 seconds and DxO close to a minute.

 

But somehow that seems to show in the results. DxO looks best, meaning pleasing

to the eye and sharp and crisp on the print, Capture One almost as good,

sometimes better and Lightroom far off both. It really is bad, very noisy even

with noise reduction on full and detail somehow seems to get lost in any setting.

 

Now I was wondering, am I doing something wrong? Lightroom is great to work with

but the other two just deliver better images.

 

Any ideas?

 

By the way, Canon?s dpp is good, but I use other camera brands as well so I want

to have a generic converter, that?s why I didn?t try it.

Any suggestions welcome.

[patricklavoie]

Something must be rong, maybe auto sharpness in some of your test is ON? maybe the noise reduction is too high on some....I use C1PRO for years, and i switch to Lr when it came out. I didtn go to C1PRO since. I use this software professionaly with well exposed shot, and control ligthing, so they are to start with pretty good. Maybe that the problem?

[randmcnatt]

We also think DXO makes better default choices (especially for skin tone) than Adobe's convertor (ie, Lightroom). But, for a well-exposed image, the jpeg straight out of the camera still beats them both. If you can shoot RAW+jpeg, that may be your best bet, just postprocessing the ones which are marginal.

 

Coincidentally, Mary and I ran a side-by-side just last night, and the order of preference was (1) camera jpeg (2) DXO jpeg from camera jpeg (possibly since it didn't really do much) (3) DXO jpeg from camera RAW, and (4) Adobe (Lightroom) from camera RAW. Stand-alone convertors weren't in the running because they're unsuited for batch work,

 

Everything was imported into Lightroom, tweaked for exposure and white balance, but nothing else, and exported as full-size jpegs. The original image was chosen because it was too dark, and we wanted to see how the various methods handled the skin tones.

 

Try this: run everything through DXO first, but before you run the batch, turn off Distorion for any image which doesn't have straight lines in it (it probably won't get noticed and the distorition correction sometimes tends to make people look fat and I feel that any operation which moves pixels is going to lose some resolution). Then, import the DXOd jpegs into Lightroom. Any image which doesn't look good, go back to DXO and reprocess, paying more attention to the settings this time; LR will see the replaced version automatically. If you still can't get a decent image, either toss it out ;) or import the original RAW file into Lightroom and play with it there, or, my choice as of now, take it to Photoshop.

 

Now, to possibly confuse you further, we've been evaluating Bibble, and, at least for us, the Perfectly Clear plugin seems to make better choices than DXO.

 

www.bibblelabs.com

[james_sawle]

I have looked at most of the software out there and have settled on Lightroom, it works (Just), and does everything that I need as a pro photographer, but I do have a VERY annoying gripe with it, it is so memmory hungry, I take about 2000 pictures a day on an average shoot, I then bring back the cards and copy them to my HDD first before importing, Why! Simple, because so some reason Lightroom will say that it can not import certain or all files, it does not seem to work well with over 500 images at a time, especially not from card readers anyway.

 

I then import from the directly from the HDD, and all is well, except that I then need to reboot the PC else the system will hang, Lightroom eats memmory, which is a joke as I have 4GB of RAM on a dual Xeon workstation, and it still kills it.

 

After the reboot, I start to go through the images, I can normally mark for deletion about 500-1000, but I only seem to be able to do about 400 at a time, then I have to quite out and restart, else the software hangs, good er!

 

Finally after I have remobved the duds, I can white balance, colour correct, and align the images, again only about 400 at a time, sometimes even less before I need a restart.

 

Then, because of the rubbish noise reduction and sharpen modules that Lightroom has, I then need to export about 100 per day to TIFF format to then edit in Photoshop.

 

My gripe is that the software does not save time, I spend more time infront of the PC than I do behind the camera.

 

If anyone knows of any software that is as good with 'Keywords' as Lightroom is, and can handle upwards of 20,000 images, I would love to hear from them.

 

Till then, I kind of like Lightroom, Roll on the update, SOON I hope...

[patricklavoie]

keyword..cumulus or portfolio (my friend have more than 100 000 image on a Xserve and use portfolio for is cataloguing purpose)

 

raw developpment...lightroom

 

for everything else there is MasterCard : )

[lars69]

Thanks for all the answers and suggestions.

 

I got a few new names out of here which I am really thankfull for. I had a quick look at bibble, which I hadn't come accross yet, and it looks very nice. And really found it intuitive and fast plus quality seem to be similar to C1. And it is a real bargain compared to the rest I think.

So I will try it a bit more and maybe go for it.

 

I also never looked at Portfolio so I will try it as well. So maybe the solution is one SW for organising my images and one for batch processing rather than only Lightroom.

 

Anyway, you gave me a few new ideas and things to try.

 

Thanks,

 

Lars