NI after RAW development
Posted: Sun Mar 14, 2010 7:25 pm
Hi NI team,
I am a happy NI user for several years now. Let me take this opportunity to thank you for your product.
I have a few questions regarding denoise with RAW workflow. I know that this topic has already been adressed in other threads here. But while I found the info therein quite useful, I still did not fully understand how to optimally make use of NI within my RAW workflow context. Hopefully you'll forgive me in case I am asking questions you long thought answered already.
I use Adobe-Camera-Raw (ACR) for RAW development:
* The basics tab with slider based adjustments of whitebalance, exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, etc
* The curves tab with tone adjustments using the in/out curves,
* The details tab with denoise and sharpening
I understood from previous posts that when applying NI after RAW development there are basically two ways to deal with potential changes in noise characteristics caused by different development settings:
a) Use the autoprofile option, which will try to create a dedicated profile from scratch for each new image. The potential disadvantage here seems to be that there has to be a suitable region for analysis in each image.
b) Use profile matching with auto-fine-tuning with profiles that were created with ACR settings as close as possible to those used for the real photos. The drawback here is of course, that the images the profiles are applied to may have matching camera settings (ISO, shutter speed, etc) but will usually differ in the ACR development settings.
Apart from my questions below, is there a clear recommendation which of the two approaches to use ?
1) If I use approach a):
Is there a possibility that NI does not find a suitable region for noise analysis at all ?
In that case (or if it only finds one of low quality), is there a possibility to tell NI to try profile matching as a fall back ?
Is there maybe a possibility for NI to try both approaches and use the one with the better quality ?
2) If I use approach b):
Can I expect auto-fine-tune to be able to cope with changes in noise characterists due to different development settings ?
Do tone adjustments using curves pose a bigger problem for auto-fine-tuning than the slider-based adjustments ?
Would you generally recommend to never use sharpening and denoise functions prior to NI denoising ?
Or is it safe to use them with fixed values when the same values are also used during the profile creation ?
3) And generally:
Is the quality indicator a reliable tool to indicate which approach gives better denoise results ?
Say, if e.g. I submit a bunch of pictures to NI batch processing one using approach a) and one using approach b), may I use the quality values to judge which approach works better for me ?
4) An then finally I was wondering:
Why not create profiles based directly on the RAW data and also apply denoise directly to the RAW data ?
Wouldn't that be the proper place to do the denoising anyway ?
In that sense, I would really appreciate if you guys could negotiate with the ACR team to integrate your excellent denoise tool as a plugin or something.
Anyhow, your support is much appreciated.
Thanks and BR,
Holger
I am a happy NI user for several years now. Let me take this opportunity to thank you for your product.
I have a few questions regarding denoise with RAW workflow. I know that this topic has already been adressed in other threads here. But while I found the info therein quite useful, I still did not fully understand how to optimally make use of NI within my RAW workflow context. Hopefully you'll forgive me in case I am asking questions you long thought answered already.
I use Adobe-Camera-Raw (ACR) for RAW development:
* The basics tab with slider based adjustments of whitebalance, exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, etc
* The curves tab with tone adjustments using the in/out curves,
* The details tab with denoise and sharpening
I understood from previous posts that when applying NI after RAW development there are basically two ways to deal with potential changes in noise characteristics caused by different development settings:
a) Use the autoprofile option, which will try to create a dedicated profile from scratch for each new image. The potential disadvantage here seems to be that there has to be a suitable region for analysis in each image.
b) Use profile matching with auto-fine-tuning with profiles that were created with ACR settings as close as possible to those used for the real photos. The drawback here is of course, that the images the profiles are applied to may have matching camera settings (ISO, shutter speed, etc) but will usually differ in the ACR development settings.
Apart from my questions below, is there a clear recommendation which of the two approaches to use ?
1) If I use approach a):
Is there a possibility that NI does not find a suitable region for noise analysis at all ?
In that case (or if it only finds one of low quality), is there a possibility to tell NI to try profile matching as a fall back ?
Is there maybe a possibility for NI to try both approaches and use the one with the better quality ?
2) If I use approach b):
Can I expect auto-fine-tune to be able to cope with changes in noise characterists due to different development settings ?
Do tone adjustments using curves pose a bigger problem for auto-fine-tuning than the slider-based adjustments ?
Would you generally recommend to never use sharpening and denoise functions prior to NI denoising ?
Or is it safe to use them with fixed values when the same values are also used during the profile creation ?
3) And generally:
Is the quality indicator a reliable tool to indicate which approach gives better denoise results ?
Say, if e.g. I submit a bunch of pictures to NI batch processing one using approach a) and one using approach b), may I use the quality values to judge which approach works better for me ?
4) An then finally I was wondering:
Why not create profiles based directly on the RAW data and also apply denoise directly to the RAW data ?
Wouldn't that be the proper place to do the denoising anyway ?
In that sense, I would really appreciate if you guys could negotiate with the ACR team to integrate your excellent denoise tool as a plugin or something.
Anyhow, your support is much appreciated.
Thanks and BR,
Holger