Monday, May 31, 2010

Recovery Positions Please

This post is a little bit of a rant about Adobe's Recovery Slider in Lightroom so I apologise now for talking about raw conversion yet again...
The following image was taken on a bright sunny day in direct sunlight and is overexposed slightly. There is detail in the bright areas that can still be recovered. I'll let the images do the rest of the talking. Click on the images for a large view.

Aperture's Recovery Slider
Lightroom's Recovery (Colour Leacher) Slider

3 comments:

  1. Never judge off the internet; however, on my monitor there is no doubt which set is exhibiting better color and that is Aperture. The uncorrected image has both better shadow and highlight detail and with 50% recovery tonal latitude and saturation appear better than Lightroom. IMHO,
    Steven

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  2. I agree Steven, judging from the internet from low quality jpeg images is far from ideal. However, here I am concerned with the hue and saturation shift that LR exhibits and by providing a "before and after" reference from both applications we can see the change quite easily. The images are also both sRGB so should look ok in almost all environments when viewed. Both images were White Balance corrected in their respective applications using the grey card but all other settings were "out of the box". They were then exported as jpegs in sRGB. The before and after images were combined in PS CS4 using the sRGB colour space to retain the the colour accuracy. None of the colour shifts seen in the images are from bad colour workflow on my part.

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  3. The two largest issues are the saturation reduction and the hue shift. Check out how the colour of the wheel barrow shifts.

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