xpatUSA1
Active Member
A geeky post from the watch guy . .
Since my main hobby isn't photography, I've been trying out various ways to convert my SD10 close-up watch shots to nice, sharp images. I rejected apps that need plug-ins to be installed, apps that have complicated UI's (e.g. command-line interfaces). I favor using just one app to open the X3F, process it and save it as a web JPEG. So I compared SPP 5.1, ACR 5.4/PSE 6 and (recently discovered) FastStone's Image Viewer. I used the same X3F HI res. source file and made three 1/2 size JPEGs, one from each app. The following is a comparison image made by opening those three JPEGs in Photoshop Elements, tiling them together and then taking and cropping a screen capture to make one image:
Please ignore the bluish color casts in SPP and ACR. For this test, I was more interested in image acutance than color balance. From the acutance viewpoint, the three methods are more or less equal. So which might I favor?
All my images are cropped, so that eliminates SPP for one-stop processing.
In terms of flexibility, the combination of ACR and PSE has much to recommend it, even though production is a tad laborious. However, my personality prompted seeking an alternative to "big business" .
For a non-mandatory $15 donation, Image Viewer is surprising good for what I do. The one thing that it's reviewers carp about is the lack of one-click white-balancing. But Image Viewer has the three hue sliders and, in combination with a screen app called ColorPix, balancing can be done. Big pluses in my view are the many choices for re-sampling (including two forms of the well-respected Lanzcos algorithm) and some interesting options for JPEG conversion . . .
The default option is "YCbCr" which meant nothing to me but it is an integral part of converting to JPEG format, apparently. The other option is "RGB" which I naively selected before doing some research. Here's a pic showing the result of both options, RGB at left:
Not much difference - until you go pixel peeping - RGB option (at left) looks like a Bayer image! . .
Not sure what the most correct of the two options is - I thought that conversion to the YCbCr color space was an integral part of the process of encoding a JPEG file, so what does the RGB option do for us, I wonder?
Anybody know for sure?
--
Best Regards,
Ted.
Since my main hobby isn't photography, I've been trying out various ways to convert my SD10 close-up watch shots to nice, sharp images. I rejected apps that need plug-ins to be installed, apps that have complicated UI's (e.g. command-line interfaces). I favor using just one app to open the X3F, process it and save it as a web JPEG. So I compared SPP 5.1, ACR 5.4/PSE 6 and (recently discovered) FastStone's Image Viewer. I used the same X3F HI res. source file and made three 1/2 size JPEGs, one from each app. The following is a comparison image made by opening those three JPEGs in Photoshop Elements, tiling them together and then taking and cropping a screen capture to make one image:
Please ignore the bluish color casts in SPP and ACR. For this test, I was more interested in image acutance than color balance. From the acutance viewpoint, the three methods are more or less equal. So which might I favor?
All my images are cropped, so that eliminates SPP for one-stop processing.
In terms of flexibility, the combination of ACR and PSE has much to recommend it, even though production is a tad laborious. However, my personality prompted seeking an alternative to "big business" .
For a non-mandatory $15 donation, Image Viewer is surprising good for what I do. The one thing that it's reviewers carp about is the lack of one-click white-balancing. But Image Viewer has the three hue sliders and, in combination with a screen app called ColorPix, balancing can be done. Big pluses in my view are the many choices for re-sampling (including two forms of the well-respected Lanzcos algorithm) and some interesting options for JPEG conversion . . .
The default option is "YCbCr" which meant nothing to me but it is an integral part of converting to JPEG format, apparently. The other option is "RGB" which I naively selected before doing some research. Here's a pic showing the result of both options, RGB at left:
Not much difference - until you go pixel peeping - RGB option (at left) looks like a Bayer image! . .
Not sure what the most correct of the two options is - I thought that conversion to the YCbCr color space was an integral part of the process of encoding a JPEG file, so what does the RGB option do for us, I wonder?
Anybody know for sure?
--
Best Regards,
Ted.
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