Has someone compared LR to PhotoNinja?

For new comparising shots and my conclusion please see http://members.chello.nl/h.borgers1/tijdelijk/LRPN.htm

This information will be there for a limited time.

Thank you all for your interest,

Harrie

After reading this post I finally downloaded the two weeks try version.

Now I'm trying to fiddle with the LR settings to get something that looks a bit like PN's output but that seems to be impossible. PN almost always gives much sharper, differentiated results. There may be some isues with highlight recovery but overall PN outperforms LR by far. It's auto-mode is much less unreliable too.

The built-in Noise Ninja does - as expected - a very fine job, better dan LR is able to.

Keith_Reeder complained about the price and I think he's right. But if PN could be used like a DAM program that would make a huge difference. Now it's "just" a superb converter and you would need something like Photo Mechanic alongside. And the GUI is flat out bad implemented.

Same with DxO - no DAM. This gives LR a very strong point.

So Adobe, take a look at Photo Ninja and maybe reverse engineer the demosaicing???

Thanks for the info hamada2003

I never heard before of that very impressing peace of software.

It provides much more details and it´s hilight recovery is better than the one in Lr.

The out-of-the-box results are way better than I can achieve with Lr or C1.

@finess99

for me, the PN image looks more realistic than the other ones.

For uploading you nef, you could try this link:

http://www.2shared.com/

Thanks to all for the info. I've never tried PhotoNinja, but I appreciate knowing about it. I'm too locked in to Lightroom to seriously consider a jump, but I hope Lr gets some more serious competition.

Hi Hamada,

I've actually bought the software (Keith may call me a sucker here, I suppose ).

I do agree in part with Keith in that it's handling of highlights, is not as graceful as LR. You can get yellow hotspots which the colour correction will not get rid of. Also it's processing workflow is a different. I actually get the approach and have no problems with it.

I must say that the images do come out with more detail (especially in shadow areas) and, to me a better 'look'.

However, every bit of image software has it's own look too - put the file through LR, Capture NX2 (which I also have), Bibble (sorry, Corel) etc and they will have differences. I actually find PNs photos more natural looking. Highly scientific tests with my family comparing processed  images had them all gravitating to PN (lol).

After using the software for a bit, I sent a feedback email to PN and received a prompt, detailed response from Jim Christian (the founder) - that bodes well for a continuous-improvement approach from PN.

I covered a wide range of topics in my email all of which received a response which left me feelling good about the future of the software.

I, for one really appreciate that it is trying to be 'best of breed' raw converter. This is clearly a different paradigm for LR, which (of course is also trying to be best raw converter), but has a much larger functional footprint by design.

I'l specifically comment on performance (since I am one of the people with the 'laggy sliders' problem in LR4.1 - I'm currently working out LR4.2, with unfortunately not positive results at the moment) - the user-experience in PN is consistent - by that I mean, no laggy sliders and the application informs you when it is processing - that means that they know how to manage their UI, worker and tools threading. When LR fires up 30+ threads (on a W7 machine) and consumes 50% of CPU (still on LR4.2) just when the mouse moves over the image - that's interesting from an application developers' pov.

I'm sorry to hear Keith that you have found it buggy - that's not been my experience. And I do understand your position in that you want to compare LR now to PN now. That's a purchasor's position - what doI get for my dollar now. I'm more inclined to look at PN from a startup-competitor and directional perspective.

I'm actually glad I spent the money on PN to help foster some competition and also to learn from what other tools can show me. Seeing a different result gets me out of the visual comfort zone. After a while you just don't see that LR does *something* to greens and starts with a somewhat processed raw file (opps! that's back to the "is zero, zero" thread).

I thought I'd give you a detailed reply Hamada, since I thought your OP reasonable and inquring (even in an adobe forum).

regards

Hans

Yes i have tested it for a few days and i think it IS impressiv.

It is a bit slow. But the rendering of small details is great.

I managed to quench out more details then with Lightroom.
And im not a Lightroom newbie, thought im a Photoninja newbie.

What looks smeared in LR often shows details in Photoninja.

Im not sure if it´s because the Noise Reduction of Photoninja is better.

In LR i normaly use around 15-30 luminance noise for images under ISO 800.  I think that is not so much.

But you can see that you lose some details in foliage etc.
With Photoninja i get the same clean image, or cleaner, but with more details.

One thing that bothers me with LR since forever are these strange artifacts you can see in your example image too, this "pixelation" around contrasty edges.

It comes from sharpening i guess but Photoninja does not show it, or much less.

Sorry i hope you all understand what i want to say. I can´t say it better with my bad english.

I also find that the colors looks great.
At least for my canon cameras i find the photoninja colors more pleasing, without any tweaking

I can only advice anyone to test this RAW converter and build your own opinion!!

I would also like to hear what you think about it.