Editing Software Riddle

[jay_d5]

I use Photoshop Elements 6.0 for my image editing. I photograph with a Nikon

dslr and shoot almost exclusively in RAW. For some reason, today I opened up an

.NEF file of a photo in IrfanView instead of Elements, without making any

adjustments to the picture. The colors were bold and the picture had greater

tonality than I remembered. I then opened up the same photo in Elements (as an

.NEF), and did not make any adjustments whatsoever. In Elements, it was

noticeablly flatter, the overall tone was more yellow, and it was brighter.

When I looked at the histograms in each program, I was even more surprised.

They were different...one being stretched out (could be due to a scale

difference in the program), and in the Elements photo, there was a concavity on

the far left that did not appear in the Irfan picture. They looked like two

completely different photos.

 

In your experience can an image editor make such a drastic difference? I tried,

unsuccessfully, to process the Elements photo so that it looked like its Irfan

counterpart. I prefer the look of the one in Irfan and wish it looked that way

in Elements right off the bat.

 

 

Here are the two photos in question:

http://www.photo.net/photo/7242055

http://www.photo.net/photo/7242049

 

 

Thanks for your help.

[jay_d5]

Here is the IrfanView photo:<div></div>

[jay_d5]

Here is the same photo in Elements 6.0, with no adjustments.<div></div>

[KenPapai]

Elements appears to have done an Auto Levels (with a strong chadows adjust) while Irfan preserved the original histogram leaving the slider(s) untouched and close to -as-shot-.

[marc_rochkind]

I don't think IrfanView displays the raw image. It displays a JPEG preview inside the file. (I don't mean the thumbnail; I mean a full-size or nearly-full-size image.) PSE, once you get to it, is showing what ACR passed to it, which came from the actual raw data.

 

Two completely different pipelines (or lack of a pipeline, in the case of IrfanView).

 

The default or initial setting of a raw processor doesn't matter (although a close one can save some time). What matters is whether the data in the raw image allows you to in the end produce the rendered image you want.

[rainer_t]

-- "I don't think IrfanView displays the raw image."

 

It depends ... within IrfanView, goto Options->Properties->PlugIns ... here you have a number of choices regarding raw files, one of them is to load the embedded jpg preview image (if one exists). Another one is to use (or not to use) white balance of the camera ... another one is to auto-white balance.

[marc_rochkind]

I didn't know that about IrfanView.

 

However, if it is showing a rendering from actual raw data, I don't see how its generic conversion can be better than what Jay is able to achieve with PSE.

 

So, I'm thinking that Jay is seeing the JPEG in IrfanView, not a rendering from raw.

[lex_jenkins]

Irfanview will handle many raw files. That's one of the beauties of this free/shareware program. And it's extremely resource efficient, making it useful for batch processing or conversions.

 

The downside is that I'm not crazy about the rendering of my Nikon D2H NEFs via Irfanview. They're not bad, just not as good as with Nikon's own software. Unfortunately, Nikon's own free software is miserably inefficient and slow and doesn't offer the batching capabilities of Irfanview.

 

A couple of years ago I posted to my photo.net portfolio the results of straight NEF-to-JPEG conversions comparing Nikon Capture, Nikon View (which were virtually identical), Bibble Pro, Photoshop Elements, Irfanview, Picasa (which can also read some raw files) and the then-popular Rawshooter. Irfanview renderings of D2H NEFs fell in the middle, not quite as good as those from Nikon's software, and much better than Rawshooter or Picasa. Bibble and Elements were tossups, since both are highly configurable.

[jay_d5]

You guys made some interesting points. The photo was shot in landscape mode in RAW, and Irfan's rendition looks a lot like what I remember seeing on the LCD, which is a jpeg conversion, right?

 

If I understand correctly then, with Elements the shooting mode is irrelevant (i.e. landscape, vivid, custom, etc.) in RAW because it does not change the RAW data? If that's the case, how can I replicate the landscape mode with Elements, while working with a RAW photo?