Lightroom vs. DPP comparison
Update: I see Google still sends people here when they look for this comparison, so I’d like to point out that this post is outdated. Lightroom 3′s noise reduction is much, much better than either of these two, and I don’t have any of these problems with it.
I’ve put together two 100% crops of a recent picture, comparing the results from Lightroom 2.5 and Digital Photo Professional 3.6.1. Where I could, I processed them identically, but generally speaking Lightroom has much finer control than DPP, so to a degree I had to just ask myself how I’d normally process the image in that program.
The comparisons show the problem I have with Lightroom: the JPGs I get out of it lose their texture to noise. The second crop is a perfect example. There are places that are much sharper in LR, like the tip of the flower bud, but towards the edges of the in-focus region, the fine detail is lost in the noise very quickly, and there’s even some color banding in the bokeh. The DPP crop, though not as detailed in the in-focus areas, doesn’t have that harsh, noisy, almost plastic texture to the bokeh and nearly-bokeh regions. Lightroom’s sharpening tool, incidentally, can mask out the low-detail regions, so it didn’t touch the areas I’m unhappy with.
This image was shot at ISO 200, with +0.33 exposure in both LR and DPP. Noise reduction is 3 luminance and 1 color in DPP; 24 luminance and 34 color in LR. (The DPP scale is 0-20, LR is 0-100. The color slider doesn’t have much effect in either on this image, as long as it’s not 0.) I don’t see much improvement in LR’s noise reduction below about 90, which seems unbelievably high for an ISO 200 image from a 40D, even with the background a stop or two intentionally underexposed. So I don’t know what’s going on here — I have to assume I’m missing something. Do I just need to crank up the noise reduction?