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PhotoEngine perfect as RAW Developer Engine
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On www.hdrfoto.nl I posted today an article about PhotoEngine as RAW developer. I automatically translated my article and post it here.
Inspite of some editing it is still not perfect English but who cares when you can understand the essentials how you can use PhotoEngine as a very good RAW development machine. Here we go:
The HDR program Oloneo photo engine could well be used as "developer" for RAW files. The same goes for Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw plugin for Photoshop and many other dedicated RAW programs. But I found it surprising that Oloneo PhotoEngine being primarily an HDR program is as good deployable as RAW developer and effortlessly produces perfect neutral and well balanced JPG and TIFF files. I am pointing to development of RAW files that are not part of a series of different exposures (so not part of a "bracket"). My conclusion is based on a test of the new beta (V1.0.400.291) released last week. At www.hdrfotos.nl/?page_id=1191 you see a screenshot of the settings I used for my test. You see, I once again make use of the (new) batch function. It is simple. You choose your scource and your destination and set "1" as "number exposures per project”.Then you choose the preset "Raw recovery" and disable the "auto align" and "interactive" checkboxes. You can see the rest of the settings in the screenshot. After clicking OK the batch begins to run. For a folder with 33 RAW files (NEF's from my Nikon D300s each approximately 12 Mb), the batch is ready after 5 minutes 46 seconds. I think this time is reasonable. Unlike ACR in Photoshop you do not have to make a preset yourself via a combination of many sliders, which also takes time, but you simply choose the “Raw recovery” preset. But if you want to give all the pictures in your map a "special effect", for example, Black & White, you choose one of the other presets. The end result with “Raw recovery” is certainly very good. I here give a selection as an example of how the image quality compares to Photoshop's ACR. It is a selection but it is representative for the whole folder. The image quality of PhotoEngine is perfect in my opninion. In fact better than ACR but it may be that the ACR settings are not 100% optimal for the pictures in this map. Perhaps that with further tweaking in ACR the same image quality is possible. But judge for yourself the image quality by clicking: www.flickr.com/photos/pixelpeter/sets/72157626436996962/s...
The first pictures of each pair is PhotoEngine and the second is ACR.
The picture quality with photo engine is perfect in my opinion but there is one drawback and that is that the number of Camera Data (Exif) is less than with ACR. Whether this is really problematic for you, you can decide for yourself. If not, then I can heartily recommend Oloneo PhotoEngine as RAW developer. Look a moment at www.flickr.com/photos/pixelpeter/sets/72157626312240313/show to see what data you are missing compared to ACR.
Peter
Originally posted at 3:01AM, 6 April 2011 PDT
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Peter's pixels edited this topic 14 months ago.
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Peter,
Great work! I am happy to see that your tests show that PhotoEngine can outperform ACR in many situations.
This is precisely our goal with Oloneo PhotoEngine. We want it to be not only the best HDR software on the market but also a very capable Raw photo processor.
I believe that Tone Mapping is progressively becoming an integral part of single Raw processing. Most Raw photos can benefit from soft Tone Mapping.
As a result, we see more and more beta testers using PhotoEngine to process Raw photos with great success.
Thanks,
Antoine Clappier
Originally posted 14 months ago.
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Oloneo (a group admin) edited this topic 14 months ago.
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I didn't test extensively but I have to agree with Peter. I was pleasantly surprised by Oloneo's RAW conversion quality, and couldn't see much difference with Canon's DPP when using standard settings, with Oloneo giving better colors. But presence of high iso noise ruins Oloneo's RAW processing result. So support for a Photoshop compatible plugin system might be needed here, so that we can use Noise Ninja or another noise reduction plugin.
Danny
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Posted 14 months ago.
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I'm a newby to RAW, but not to Oloneo PE ... since last year, used on older jpgs initially ... I just wanted to say, I am an HDR "fanatic" ... and I have achieved amazing and most pleasing results with O-PE from my 1st usage right through to the current/latest, and I am en more enthusiastic to having the "presets" available to get a kick-start... as well as the manual control ... I just wanted to somehow get my opinion to the Developer/s and say, that as an experienced user of several other "hdr programs", it is O-PE that continues to be one of my preferred,as I like being able to put RAF/RAW, strait from my Fuji, and get a result in user-friendly time ... thanks, and all the best with this project/enterprise, and I look forward to my continual user/support ... this program is definitely heading in the right-direction IMhO .... cheers ...
Posted 14 months ago.
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Antoine,
Is PE expected to provide the mitigation of chromatic aberrations in the next beta release?
Kelly
Posted 14 months ago.
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As Danny said, a Photoshop-compatible plugin system would be terrific. I don't know whether this is feasible to do (and I'm guessing Oloneo PE has some pretty complicated data structures in memory) but in some way or other it would really great if we could run a noise reduction tool (I use Noise Ninja) as part of the processing.
Right now my "pipeline" looks like this:
1. Nikon ViewNX to convert to uncompressed 16-bit TIFFs. (I often read that Nikon does the best conversion from NEF, though I don't see any issues with Oloneo.)
2. Noise Ninja to process into new 16-bit TIFFs.
3. Oloneo to process into 8-bit TIFFs. (or JPGs if no further editing is needed)
4. GIMP for any final editing.
So, being able to plug in the NN processing would possibly remove 2 steps. The nice thing though is that all 3 of these tools have batch processing now.
I think tools like NN can also be run from the command-line, so having a way to write a TIFF, run NN or some other tool, and load its output back into Oloneo prior to HDR processing would provide the same functionality (though probably more slowly).
--Todd
Posted 14 months ago.
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