A

Anonymous

Question

Has someone compared LR to PhotoNinja?

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
October 3, 2012
6 replies
27047 views

http://www.picturecode.com/index.php

how does LR and PhotoNinja compare in image quality?

the reviewer seem to be impressed.

but how much is just PR blahblah (makes small format camera images look like medium format) .... how much is fact?

“I have been using Photo Ninja for a while now and I must confess that the image quality is amazing. Better than any other raw converter I have ever used. The images get this ‘realistic’ look. I cannot describe it better than that.”
Tomas Hellström Photography enthusiast, Sweden

“Photo Ninja makes small format camera images look like medium format work -- simply fantastic!”
Pete Myers Fine art photographer, Santa Fe, NM.
“...a stellar raw converter...”
Rob Galbraith

“The image quality this program produces absolutely destroys any other raw converter I've tried in terms of colour reproduction, exposure controls, and noise reduction. ”
Mark van Dam Wedding photographer, Wasaga Beach, Ontario

edit:

i have spend a few minutes with it.
loaded some DNG files and compared it to LR.

i noticed that the highlight and shadow adjustments in photoninja work more restricted.

they don´t affect the medium tones as much as LR.
for the images i tried it on i liked it better then lightroom.

the colors are way better out of the box. that really suprises me.

i have only looked at a dozend of photos yet but color rendition seems to be great out of the box.

the photos i have looked at show a blue yamaha R1 bike on a racetrack.
no matter what LR profile i use the color is off by default (too purble or too light blue).

the photoninja color is SPOT ON without any editing.

i sure will spend some more time testing photoninja.

here is a crop from an image (from the image backround, not in focus. but look how much detail photoninja managed to show).

best i could achive with LR and with photoninja.

http://i.imgur.com/8b72x.jpg

This topic has been closed for replies.

HarrieB

Inspiring

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

HarrieB

Inspiring

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???

areohbee

Legend

harrieb wrote:
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???

If you prefer PhotoNinja's demosaicing, you can use PhotoNinja in conjunction with Lightroom very easily:

Just save PhotoNinja's output to a folder accessible in Lightroom and manually sync folder after saving in PN, or use auto-import. (OttoImporter works very well for this, once it's set up).

And using both to work on the same photo works well too - i.e. just do the part PN is best at, and then take it the rest of the way with Lr.

One of the advantages of this approach is that rendering in Lr is much faster, so you don't have to spend so much time staring at the "Loading..." indicator.

I was just doing that with DxO as a test - worked great (comparison of DxO with Lr is "out of scope" (too far off topic) )

R

A

Anonymous

From Lightroom you can "edit in" PhotoNinja. PhotoNinja will find the raw file to which the tiff refers and then when you are done working on the raw file, it will overwrite Lightroom's tiff.

A

Anonymous

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/

areohbee

Legend

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.

ButterFingers

Participating Frequently

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

Keith Reeder

Participating Frequently

1234ewqrd wrote:
Hi Hamada,
(Keith may call me a sucker here, I suppose ).

Why on earth would I do that? I truly don't care what you do with your money.

Yet again: the thread asked for people's opinions of PN in comparison with Lr: I answered. Nothing suggested that only responses that gushed mindless approbation for the software would be acceptable.

Why on God's green earth is it such a bloody problem for some people that PN doesn't satisfy my converter needs? I'm not going to apologise for having high standards.

I can't be bothered to rehash my findings, but you read about them - including the bugs - here.

ButterFingers

Participating Frequently

Hi Keith,

Thanks for the link - I had not seen that thread on LuLa. Useful reading for others interested in PN.

In regards to my byline to you possibly calling me a sucker for paying ... it was intended as a joke only.

Hans

A

Anonymous

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.

A

Anonymous

Here is a review:

http://billstormont.wordpress.com/?page_id=3927&preview=true

No matter if you like Photoninja or not, one thing is 100% sure in my opinion:

the default rendering of Photoninja is worlds ahead of LR and ACR.

Lightrooms "AUTO" feature is pretty useless, while Photoninjas default image settings (calculated default settings) work most of the time very good.

Adobe should look at this raw converter and get some ideas how to make Lightrooms AUTO feature work.

A

Anonymous

Read the postings again.. nobody denied the issues PN has.

Still the RAW engine is great in my opinion.

I did not dismiss LR 4 because it´s Clarity feature sucked... i waited for a fix.

And i guess the Highlight feature in PN will be fixed soon too.

No need to have the ability to see into the future or be very clever to make such a guess.

Keith_Reeder schrieb:
My opinion is nothing to do with "skimping" - the simple fact is that it's not worth the price, which is a different thing altogether.

That´s to a great deal subjectiv.

For some Photoshop is not woth 10x more then Elements.

You get Linux for free.. Windows not.

ps:

someone gave me the tipp to use "color recovery" to get rid of the introduced colors in the highlights.

you may want to test that if you did not already.

my guess is they do it this way because if you want to recover highlights in skintones it is better to interpolate to the the surrounding colors.

shadow/highlight in photoshop, for example produces gray.

photo ninja tries to get a color similiar to the skintone.

of course that is counter productive when you have pure white... like your swan.

i will test it as soon as i am at home.

ps ps:

yep it´s all explained here:

http://www.picturecode.com/tutorials/hr.php

Keith_Reeder schrieb:
This is the best PN could do (and don't anyone even think of suggesting I need to learn to use PN. No user error here).

Well.... i guess you should not be so confident about that next time.

I tried it on a few images (some white bird images like yours) and it worked flawless when done right.

i don´t know if he has used color recovery on that image.

but i did not notice these false colors myself, when the color recovery is used correct.

maybe you should upload that image keith reeder, so we all could have a look?

maybe it´s a camera brand dependend issue? only noticable with certain RAW formats?

but i did notice that photo ninjas highlight recovery does a better job on skintones then lightroom.

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