Photo Ninja

[CM Works]

Hi. How many of you are using photo ninja?

[stenrasmussen]

I am in the process of evaluating different raw converters and PN is one of them. I like what PN does apart from the lousy highlight processing. Irident Developer and LR (Adobe Camera Raw) does a much better job here.

What I don't like about LR (ACR) is the poor sharpening algorithm for RAF files. 

So far I am leaning towards ID as my standard raw developer. But the jury is not back yet 

[flysurfer]

Iridient is great with Iridient Reveal and Detail Demosaicing default settings, but I often get even more detail from LR with the right settings. 

[pluton]

I have Photo Ninja, but use Lightroom for X files  98% of the time.  

[CM Works]

I am in the process of evaluating different raw converters and PN is one of them. I like what PN does apart from the lousy highlight processing. Irident Developer and LR (Adobe Camera Raw) does a much better job here.

What I don't like about LR (ACR) is the poor sharpening algorithm for RAF files.

So far I am leaning towards ID as my standard raw developer. But the jury is not back yet

Are you using it right? Because I think pn is the best in highlight recovery

[stenrasmussen]

Are you using it right? Because I think pn is the best in highlight recovery

 

 

I am not using PN as I am still in evaluation mode.

So far (in order best to worst):

 

Highlight recovery: ID - LR (ACR)  - PN

- PN seeiming best but when looking at details it leaves a low bit rendering resulting in color artifacts.

 

Sharpening/less plastic appearance: PN - ID - LR (ACR)

- Difference between PN and ID is small but in very light areas PN is slightly better. LR(ACR) fails big time in keeping edges undisturbed, even with a small radius and large masking setting.

 

Shadow recovery: Draw between PN and LR (ACR). ID follows just behind but struggles with color fidelity. 

[stenrasmussen]

Further investigation reveals (to me at least) that ID has a gentler pixel to pixel contrast profile that both PN and LR (ACR). I tried to mimic the smooth (less jaggedy) transitions of ID in both the others without success. The only way to mimic it was to reduce clarity but that is NOT the way to get it right. 

Below are some screenshots illustrating this. Please note that the grabs were capture at 300% and 400% and I've made them monochrome for the sake of judging demoasic'ing. The full picture is shown first (the red rectangles indicate where the crops are from.

 

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[stenrasmussen]

First with default settings (everything; sharpening/NR off, neutral profiles, etc.).

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[stenrasmussen]

Here where the PN and LR (ACR) has been adjusted to get close to ID's smoother pixel transition.

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[MikeA]

I haven't decided yet if I should think of Photo Ninja's user interface as "quirky" or "innovative." I notice that, compared with Lightroom, PN seems to render fine detail a bit better. But I have had ongoing problems with PN's adding a strange pink-ishness to images, in particular to skin tones, and that hasn't been easy to correct. I don't think (but I'm not sure) this is simply a white-balance issue. I don't see this "pink shift" problem at all with Lightroom.

 

After upgrading to LR 6 (CC) I did not notice the kind of detail "smearing" that some people have reported with X-Trans files as processed in LR. It did a reasonable job with sharpening and noise reduction. So far these results seemed pretty satisfactory — and a professional photographer I've been corresponding with gave me a semi-stern, semi-friendly lecture: stop pixel peeping. I'm always saying that to people and then turn around and do it myself way too often. :-)

 

C1 remains something of an unknown. I had a demo of v.8.2; it has now expired. I'm intimidated by the upgrade cost — but the same professional photographer who gave me the lecture raves about the high quality of C1 output. So I'm still tempted despite the cost.

 

[Lino]

Well, my workflow is based on the combo usage between PN and LR.
LR for import and catalog - ok, that's the initial point. After that i choose the correct camera color profile in LR to match the one i choose on camera.
After that, i use PN for de-mosaicing and some basic adjustments like NR or sharpening, highlights and shadow recovery and save it. PN is unreplaceable on this process, i've tried some other 3rd-party softwares and this one works like a charm in my X100s files. 
Back the LR i only adjust some parameters like color, contrast or vibration and that's all, i just export it the way i want to.
Resuming, working as a standalone app for processing RAF files, i would not recomend PN, but as an external editor it's amazing when you get a consistent workflow in your photos.