Lightroom vs. DPP comparison

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.


View original


View original

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?

Lightroom

I'm playing with the Adobe Lightroom trial again. I've used it in the past and wasn't happy with the JPGs I got out of it: there was a weird plastic texture that I think had to do with noise reduction, and the contrast just didn't seem quite there. Canon's DPP gave me much better results in that regard, even though the organization, tagging, and interface are so poor, so I never made the jump to Adobe.



But lately, the workflow issues around DPP have just gotten to me. I've caught myself letting photos sit on the camera because I don't want to deal with the ordeal of processing them in DPP. Don't get me wrong: individual photos are fine to work with, but sorting through 200 shots, deleting the rejects, and then getting to the individual picks is a pain. And that's not even looking at DPP's total inability to handle data like tags and captions, which means my DPP workflow often has to involve two, three, or sometimes four separate programs to get my work online. And Lightroom can do all that stuff easily.



So, I'm reading up on Lightroom again, and already found some good advice for dealing with sharpening and tone curves in it. I'm looking through old favorites to see what I can do with them, and we'll see how it goes.