People sometimes say that all digital images look the same. I don't think they're referring to noise versus grain, the large DOF of small sensor cameras, or the tendency many of us have to overprocess our images. These are all issues that affect the usual "digital look," but color and distribution of tones are closer to the heart of the matter. On the one hand, each company has a characteristic way to do color and contrast, and this is apparent in the look of in-camera JPEGs. In this way, the "look" imparted by an in-camera image processing engine is a bit like a film stock. Each camera brand has a characteristic way of handling color and contrast, and often I can spot the images from one versus another. Yet, as anyone who has ever shot film knows, the differences between different film stocks are far more distinct than the differences between in-camera image processing engines. It seems that with digital cameras, each company is going for a similar basic look. With film stocks, each company has gone for something unique.

A number of folks with considerable experience shooting film and good Photoshop skills have been able to simulate the look of their favorite films through postprocessing. Petteri has a very nice writeup of his thoughts and experiences in this area. He was also kind enough to share his curves via a download link at the end of the article. Yet many simply don't have the film experience to know which stocks they like. Some of us don't even know what look we want until we see it. That's where Alien Skin's Exposure comes in. Exposure allows us to apply the look of a film stock of choice to our images. There are tons of color and black and white film stocks to choose from. For those of us who don't know much about the look of these films, it allows us to preview the image with any given film simulation. For those who know a bit about processing, there are some great tools included for customizing color and contrast settings from the defaults for a given film stock, and it is simple to save these customized simluations for repeat use at a later time. There are plenty of Exposure reviews online, and my purpose with this post isn't to do another one. My point is simply to say that Exposure has completely changed the way I process. I now convert from RAW with a goal of creating a flat contrast image with true colors, and nearly every resulting image goes through Exposure. Often I don't even know how I want an image to look until I start applying a variety of simulations. I'll go through each in turn until one just looks right. At $249, it's an expensive product, but worth the asking price to me. I'm still using version 1.5 because I'm more than happy with the results and don't want to pay the $149 upgrade price. For anyone whose postprocessing results don't meet their needs, I can easily recommend Alien Skin Exposure.

Click here to view an animated GIF comparing a few of my favorite film simulations with the default colors from a C1 converted 5D image. The file is over 3MB in size, so it may take a while to load.

Earlier today, I blogged about the relative qualities of Adobe Lightroom (LR) 1.2 and Phase One Capture One (C1) 4 beta with regards to the processing of high ISO files from the Olympus E-410. Having also recently processed Ricoh GX100 files in both LR and C1 (beta), I thought I'd share an example from the GX100 here as well.

I took this ISO 800 shot with my GX100 earlier this evening to use as an example. I should note first that C1 does not officially support GX100 files, though it has preliminary support for the DNG format and will process Ricoh RAW.

Here is a screenshot of the low-light ISO 800 image being processed in LR 1.2 on the left and C1 4 beta on the right. Click the image twice for the intended viewing size. Both programs preview changes in real time when viewing at 100% like this, so these are how the processed images look as well. As you can see, there is a lot of blotchy color noise in the LR image despite the color noise removal being maxed out. IMO the character of the noise is also less attractive in LR.


Here are the images after processing in Noise Ninja (NN) using the same NN parameters for noise removal and sharpening. As before, the LR image is on the left and the C1 image is on the right. As you can see, the "coarse noise" option in Noisehttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif Ninja was able to improve, but not eliminate, the color blotches in the LR image.


I did this all very quickly, so the colors are uncorrected in the case of both LR and C1. If anyone is interested, I have made both the RAW (DNG) file as well as the in-camera JPEG (B&W) available as a downloadable zip file here.

I should mention that although I showed this file being processed with all kinds of sharpening, I never treat my high ISO GX100 images that way. With this type of shot, I generally apply zero sharpening and only the standard level of luminance NR in C1, which is less than zero sharpening in LR terms. I also generally convert to B&W using Alien Skin Exposure. In my opinion, the ISO 800 noise from the GX100 has a pleasant quality when left without sharpening with C1 as the RAW processor. Here's a 50% crop of the image given that treatment (Click image twice for full size):


Here's the resized image:


The default in-camera JPEG for comparison: