Jump to content
UltravioletPhotography

Photo Ninja vs. Capture One Pro


Recommended Posts

I am writing a review on RAW converters for UV photography for the UV4Plants Bulletin. I have used my own images, so all of them from an Olympus E-M1. Some of the test results were as expected, but I got some surprises:

 

i) Photo Ninja could handle the very extreme white balancing needed, while Lightroom 6.9 and DXO OpticsPro 11 could not and images retained a very strong colour cast (nothing new here).

 

ii) Photo Ninja introduced a small scale but very strong mosaic pattern in the white balanced images (at normal magnification shows up as lack of resolution of fine detail). The different "Demosaic" settings had a small effect, but the problem persisted. This could because the E-M1 camera has no antialising filter on the sensor. (The two examples are out of registration, but they partly overlap). Top image processed in Capture One Pro, lower one in Photo Ninja.

 

post-126-0-20502500-1496656425.jpg

post-126-0-04217300-1496656514.jpg

 

Question 1: Has anybody seen this with other cameras? Is this a common problem or just specific to the ORF images from the E-M1?

 

iii) When using the eye dropper tool on a target on an image to find the "white" balance of high ISO (noisy) images, each click gives a drastically different white balance in Photo Ninja (I guess the target area is too small).

Question 2: Have you experienced this problem? Is there a solution to it?

 

iv) For ORF raw files the free Olympus Viewer 3 does and excellent job at colour balancing UV images. A lot more consistent than Photo Ninja...

This was a nice surprise, although the program mostly provides the same controls as for in-camera conversion.

 

v) Phase One's Capture One Pro does an excellent job at both white balancing, and demosaic of ORF images. The only problem I found is that the extreme white balance correction for UV images cannot be copy and pasted between photographs.

Question 3: Is anybody in this group using Capture One Pro for UV images?

 

Question 4: Has anybody tried other camera makers' free RAW converters with UV images?

 

Many thanks for any answers to these questions... I do not want to get things wrong in the article.

 

Thanks in advance!

Link to comment

v) Phase One's Capture One Pro does an excellent job at both white balancing, and demosaic of ORF images. The only problem I found is that the extreme white balance correction for UV images cannot be copy and pasted between photographs.

Question 3: Is anybody in this group using Capture One Pro for UV images?

 

It can. You just need to make sure this function is enabled in the "Adjustment Clipboard".

Link to comment

Pedro, the pattern you got is a sharpening artefact (too strong sharpening). You can get it with ?probably all? RAW converters. You have to find a balance with the sharpening and de-noise sliders (that is my experience with different converters).

 

With ACR (Lightroom&PS) you need to make your own camera profile, then the results can be quite good, but it takes some testing to make a usable profile (by the way: same goes for IR-photos, some of my profiles for IR work on UV as well)

 

A further converter, which works fine with respect to WB is SilkyPix (?is coming with the Panasonics, maybe as well with Olympus?), it is not so good (may be my version is a bit old or I failed to use it correctly) for de-noising.

Link to comment

Photo Ninja introduced a small scale but very strong mosaic pattern in the white balanced images.

 

Make sure the Sharpening slider is defaulted to 0.

Make sure the Detail slider is defaulted to 0.

Turn Noise Ninja on/off to see if that affects the patterning.

Save your photo from Photo Ninja as a high quality TIF or JPG.

 

When using the eye dropper tool on a target on an image to find the "white" balance of high ISO (noisy) images, each click gives a drastically different white balance in Photo Ninja (I guess the target area is too small).

Question 2: Have you experienced this problem? Is there a solution to it?

 

Yes, the Photo Ninja dropper is draggable. So drag the dropper across an area to produce an average white balance.

You can drag the dropper across the entire photo if desired.

Sometimes I make a circular pattern with the dropper in my round Labsphere white target. "-)

Ideally the target area in the photo is not too small.

Also, you must not over-expose your white target. That can lead to inaccurate WB.

 

Has anybody tried other camera makers' free RAW converters with UV images?

 

Yes. Nikon's free raw converters can white balance UV images. That would be Capture NX-D and View-NX currently.

As you have seen, not every converter app can manage the temperature range required to white balance a UV image. For some converters, camera/lens profiling is required.

Link to comment

Thanks, Andrea!

 

Using the settings you suggested I get some improvement, but not much. Putting Detail at -50 softens the pattern, but it does not remove it. Any attempt at colour enhancement, brings the pattern back. At least for this image, Capture One Pro, does a better job. Maybe this image is pathologically bad... I will try a few more photographs to see if the difference is consistent.

 

Using the dropper as you suggest does work. Thanks! It is rather confusing that no marquee is displayed.

Yes, I am aware of avoiding over exposure of the target.

 

Good to know about the Nikon software.

 

Thanks Werner!

 

To some extent slight sharpening was making the pattern worse, and a bit of colour enhancement also contributed. In some way Capture One Pro seems to keep this problem under control even when using a relatively strong colour enhancement setting.

 

Thanks Oleksandr!

 

Yes, the problem seems to be that when settings are so close to the limit of 14000 K colour temperature, and -50 for tint, the settings although being copied, not always have the expected effect on the white balance. So, by looking at the preview the apply command did not seem to work as expected, but by looking at the values next to the sliders, I can see that they are indeed being copied as expected.

 

Some more testing to do... before the manuscript gets ready.

Link to comment

Pedro, please let us know what you eventually discover about this EM1 mosaic pattern.

 

Is it possible that there is some Olympus EM1 setting you use but which the Photo Ninja converter cannot "read"? I can't figure out why PN would produce such a extreme pattern but Capture 1 would not. This is an interesting mystery.

 

Could it be that your version of Photo Ninja is out-of-date and somehow does not fully recognize the EM1 raw file? This seems unlikely, but I'll ask anyway.

 

If I got such an unusual result from Photo Ninja, I think I would write the developers and show them exactly what you showed us here. Perhaps they would have a suggestion. The folks at PN are fairly responsive.

Link to comment
From what I have seen this pattern is a result of demosaicing. Try the free RawTherapee and try different demosaic methods. As you say, it might be a combination of physical and software, if changing demosaic method does not improve it.
Link to comment
Yesterday I took additional photographs, using an E-M1 modified for full spectrum, and the problem does not appear. I need to investigate more, but I suspect that the difference is that the problem image has a very strong blue channel with both green and red weak. While with the full-spectrum camera, green channel is very weak compared to red and blue, but these two channels are not so different. By the way, with these images with only very weak green, I cannot get a good colour balance with Capture One (without a camera profile), but Photo Ninja does a good job. So, for the time being I assume that the odd problem I had with the earlier image was the result of how the image was captured. Yesterday was sunny, but today it rained the whole day, so I need to wait until the weather improves before I can get some additional images to play with.
Link to comment

Pedro, thanks for the update.

 

I was looking at the demosaicing choices on Photo Ninja. In the Help section for the Demosaic slider, the Moderate and Aggressive settings are recommended for use with a camera which does not have an anti-aliasing filter. Am I correct in understanding that these settings did not help with the problem?

 

Do you think that noise in the file could have contributed to the problem?

 

****

 

I have found that Photo Ninja can almost always provide a good white balance for false colours. I also note that using the color enhancement sliders can sometimes be useful in cleaning up any unwanted color cast. For example, if I see a lingering pale magenta color cast in a UV photo, I move the Saturation slider for the Magenta patch to 0. I sometimes set the Cyan patch Saturation slider to 0 to remove a color cast from a blown highlight area which has not been brought fully under control (assuming that cyan is not needed elsewhere in the photo).

Link to comment
Andrea, the Moderate and Aggressive settings helped only very little. During the weekend I'll try to get to the bottom of this and will upload the histograms from RawDigger. I received yesterday a PTFE slab I ordered with the intention of using as a target. I cleaned and slightly roughened the surface with wet/dry sandpaper (grit P2000) used under running water. The target seems to be fine, at least under UVA LEDs. Earlier I used the grey side a Novoflex Zebra grey/white card as target but it does fluoresce a bit under UV, and it also shows a step change in reflectance at around 400 nm.
Link to comment

The sanded PTFE will be very useful for white balance in any of UV/Vis/IR. Works well in sunlight too.

 

PTFE or Spectralon can become quite full of static electricity and attract scads of lint & dust. Keeping canned air or a bulb blower handy is helpful. Sometimes I just rinse off my PTFE. I hesitate to do that with Spectralon because I'm afraid chemicals in the water will affect it.

 

A very useful thing is to frame the PTFE with wood or metal so that it may be more easily handled.

Link to comment

Hi,

 

I have searched and found a few RAW-converters that can do white balance on RAW-files even with photos filtered for UV-BG like the BUG5 and BUG-3 from uviroptics.

These files are more difficult to handle than files filtered with BaaderU

Note, except for ON1 the programs are not for Windows, but only MacOS and also sometimes on different Linux OS's

 

I have plans to write more about my impressions later but just want to mention them quickly here.

(Where should I place the impressions-post?)

 

RPP RAW Photo processor, Mac only

http://www.raw-photo...P/Overview.html

 

Darktable, Mac and diverse Linux

http://www.darktable.org/

 

Also, the ON1 Photo RAW handles those RAW files. It is in the same price range as PhotoNinja

https://www.on1.com/...ucts/photo-raw/

Link to comment

Thanks, Ulf.

 

You can provide a review here in UV/IR Techniques and Tests.

Link to comment

Downloaded ON1 and not very impressed. The UI is "mousy" to say the least. Reading of files across a gigabit network is slow and some commands just hang up the program and are almost impossible to stop ('Resize' being one bad example). W/b ability on various UV files looks mediocre, no doubt troubled by actions that are one-time active only. Meaning they work the first time then don't function any more or simply disappear. Thus I "lost" the Development option quite quickly, Custom W/B could not properly handle the D3200 files, slow rendering, and so on.

 

Win7-64, 32 GB, 1 TB worth of SSDs, Quad-Core I7.

 

Compared to the On1 I installed, Photo Ninja is a high-speed development machine.

Link to comment

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...