Wednesday, April 27, 2011

F550EXR – ACR 6.4 RAW Conversion of 3200 ISO Image – Review Part 46

I went back in time to the owl images that I covered in part 29, shot at 3200 ISO in jpeg and RAW. I was comparing with the F300 back then, but here I am just showing how cleanly ACR converts the RAW image.

There is no noise reduction in this image beyond Adobe’s ACR chroma (which is magnificent) and a small amount of luminance NR in ACR as well. I did have to remove some flare from lights that were raking across the lens from the bottom right corner, but that does not affect the image much at all.

Note the cleanliness of the details and the smoothness of the walls etc. This camera takes quite a nice 3200 ISO image. I do understand that there is no hair or other fine low-contrast detail in this image, but it is still pretty nice to look at for its ISO.

But it gets even nicer when Topaz Denoise 5 is applied delicately. In Photoshop, you can always fade the results of any filter after the fact to tailor the output. I did not need to here, but had there been too much smoothing I would not have hesitated to tone it down.

Even at blog size, the difference is pretty obvious. Topaz is famous for removing grain with minimal impact on detail. The sliders are not twitchy, which allows confident control over all forms of noise, even in the red and blue channels separately. Very cool tool.

So there you have it. I’m really liking ACR for the EXR sensor. I cannot say it enough. Thanks Adobe!

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