ChromaSoft

In my previous post on the subject of the color responses of Aperture, Lightroom and Capture, I mentioned that once I adjusted for exposure and contrast, the rendition that Capture One gave became very bright. The image that I was using was taken with a Nikon D80, and is not particularly badly exposed. Below is the rendering that Aperture gives completely unadjusted:

Aperture 2 test chart, unadjusted

And now the image that Aperture 2 gives when the adjusted. The process that I followed was to adjust the exposure and contrast setting of each program to get the “White” and “Black” patches to exactly the correct values.

In this post, I’ll look at the color response of Capture One, Lightroom and Aperture against an image of an actual GretagMacbeth test chart, as cteated on a Nikon D80, rather than the Leica M8 I used in the previous post. As was the case last time, I first adjust the contrast and exposure setting on each program to exactly match expected values of the lightest and darkest monochrome patches on the GretagMacbeth chart.

In the previous part of this mini-review, I looked at the color response of Capture One, Lightroom and Aperture against a synthetically generated GretagMacbeth test chart. In this post, I’ll look at the response of the same programs against an image of an actual GretagMacbeth test chart. The process that I will follow for the actual image is a little different to that for the synthetic image.

At long last, here’s the comparison of color rendering promised several weeks ago – between work and the display board in my main PC failing, this has taken longer than I’d expected. This post compares the color rendering of Lightroom, Aperture and Capture One versus a synthetic test image. That image was created by taking the raw image from a Leica M8, which is in DNG format, and then replacing the contents of the image with a synthetic version of a GretagMacbeth 24-patch color chart.

In part 1 of this series, I promised to show the tone curves for the various raw developers that I'm looking at. Here they are:

The Lightroom curves, for various settings of brightness and contrast - brightness has by far the most pronounced impact the image. In Lightroom, to get to a linear curve, you need to do three things - set brightness to zero, set contrast to zero, and select "Tone Curve - Flat" from the presets.

Just before the Christmas break, I decided to spend some time over the holidays comparing Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom, Apple’s Aperture and Phase One’s Capture One raw developer/digital asset management products. By way of background I’ve been a Lightroom user since the earlier betas, and really like Lightroom’s workflow management. But I’ve never been happy with Lightroom’s color rendition, but have also not had the time to really dig into why I wasn’t getting what I wanted.