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Comparing Silkypix with Adobe Camera Raw (June 2005)
How playing with a new raw converter taught me some new tricks.
I primarily use Adobe's Camera Raw (ACR) converter to work on my raw files. I have found that ACR does a great job working on the raw files from my Kodak SLR/n. It provides exellent color, good control, and interfaces very well with Bridge, Adobe's file browser and organizing tool. Recently, a new raw converter from Japan came out called Silkypix, so I decided to give it a look. Silkypix's interface is quirky, and is littered with bad translations. But it adds some interesting twists to the raw workflow, including some powerful noise reduction and sharpening tools. I quickly became impressed with its results, finding that I could often quickly produce images that looked better than what I was getting from ACR.
But the more I compared the two, the more I began to suspect that these improvements were not because Silkypix was doing a better job, but were really just a side effect of its quirky interface. Because it had a different workflow from ACR, and often used unfamiliar words for common controls, I had to slow down and really pay attention to what I was doing. In comparison, I had gotten so used to ACR that I would work quickly (i.e. sloppily) following a common workflow without really paying attention to what each image actually needed.
So to figure out what was happening, I decided to take some of the good results I was getting in Silkypix, and try to "reverse-engineer" them in ACR and Photoshop. I wanted to use the example Silkypix gave me to force myself to relearn ACR. This article shows a comparison of the two programs as I tried to match their results.
NOTE: this is not attempting to be an all-inclusive or scientific test. It is a highly-subjective and hastily-made comparion, done for my own needs. I am posting it online just to illustrate something I found useful and interesting. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary. Also, all these images were reduced 50% (using bicubic interpolation) and saved as JPEGs (60% quality), so take them with grain of salt.
Test 1: Comparing Color and Tone
All of these images are from one photograph of a decayed leaf I took with my Kodak SLR/n. The image below compares the color and tone of Silkypix (left) vs ACR (right). Note that all sharpening options were turned off for this test, so that it didn't influence me.
Color and tone of Silkypix (left) vs ACR (right)
I really liked the results I got from Silkypix, after just some quick white balance and tonal work. But I found that I was pretty easily able to get very close results in ACR, with just a little work. I discovered that I had been making some assumptions when working with ACR, that were giving me not-so-great results. I was always trying to boost exposure and brightness to get the brightest image, often at the expense of a more balanced color and tonality. Comparing the results to Silkypix forced me to drop those assumptions, and try again from scratch. I started descreasing both exposure and brightness, and using ACR to create a more "flat" and balanced image.