Something very wrong with G11 conversions

[dhphoto]

Just tried a sample G11 conversion, sunny day, well exposed shot, everything set to default, the image preview looked Very desaturated and dull, as did the converted image.

Also, we really do need a much bigger preview and at the very least an ability to zoom to check sharpness for the wonderful BB to be taken seriusly as a RAW converter! (sorry Chris, but it's true)

David

[DavidB]

I haven't got a G11, and so cannot really comment on that issue, but, just in case, have you checked that the conversion method is set to 'Normal' rather than 'Linear' (which on its own does produce a very desaturated effect)?

As regards your request for a bigger preview, I cannot but agree. With today's large screens, we should at least be able to maximize the raw converter window, with the preview filling the available space. But a 1:1 preview, with scrolling and/or a magnifier, would be even better.

That said, the things I personally miss most from the converter are a fixed aspect ratio crop and a straightening facility. I'd like to be able to combine these with PicLens, so that the full size image is corrected, then straightened and cropped as required.

Where I part company with you to some extent is on the degree to which BB Pro should be 'taken seriously' as a RAW converter. I regularly use both Lightroom 2 and Capture One 5 as well as BB Pro. The first two (which are, of course, both significantly more costly) have vastly greater power and capability than BB Pro, but it has the particular advantage for Canon DSLR users that it makes use of the Canon SDK, and so often provides a better baseline to work from. Quite often, it is not easy to tell that one is 'over-cooking' a conversion in some way; reference to the baseline (which may not be the ideal conversion in itself) is often for me the best way to tell whether I need to go back and have another go. The only other way to do the same thing is to use Canon's own software, which is itself a great deal more difficult to take seriously than BB Pro ...

David

[dhphoto]

No it wasn't set to linear, the preview and resultant jpeg were just completely wrong, very undersaturated indeed, not even close to how they should be

As far as RAW conversion goes, I can't use BB without much more sophisticated sharpening, preview, rotation and all the other things we now take for granted in our converters

David

[DavidB]

As far as RAW conversion goes, I can't use BB without much more sophisticated sharpening, preview, rotation and all the other things we now take for granted in our converters.
Well you could use it, but, like me, you now find that there are usually better ways to do the job. Which is not to deny that BB Pro is entirely capable of producing excellent conversions.

I notice that you say 'converters', but this is an area of the market which is surely now becoming a bit of a one horse race. It's not that the likes of Bibble, Capture One and DxO are not still being developed, but set against the dominance of Photoshop and Lightroom (both of which use the ACR engine), they must be finding it increasingly hard to compete with Adobe on price/performance even in the professional market. Certainly, although I would not expect Chris to say this openly, there must be a limit to the amount of development effort he can sensibly put into BB Pro in the current state of the market, even though it is still in my opinion the best workflow tool available.

David

[dhphoto]

Yes, I would now find life difficult without BB for my sorting, renaming and web galleries, it is an excellent and versatile program. But for RAW conversions I swap betweem C1 Pro and Lightroom, which have much better useablity than BB for that.

[Chris Breeze]

Unfortunately Canon discontinued the PowerShot SDK some time ago and so their excellent raw conversion libraries aren't available to other apps like BBPro. This means that BBPro has to use the open source DCRAW conversion libraries instead. Normally these do a very good job of converting most raw files (it has improved enormously over the last few years). However, there does appear to be a problem with saturation when converting G11 raw files with the latest version of DCRAW. You can correct for it by increasing the saturation in BBPro's post-processing options. Hopefully this will be fixed in a future update of DCRAW.

BTW Canon continue to support the EOS SDK for raw conversion of images from Canon DSLRs and have stated that they will continue to do so for the forseeable future.

[dhphoto]

Wasn't my imagination then, good.

FWIW I tried increasing the saturation but to be honest it didn't help.

David

[Chris Breeze]

Cranking the saturation up to 160 and setting the gamma to 0.9 gives good results with my sample raw files. The results aren't identical to the JPEG preview in the original raw files but then I feel the JPEG preview is way too saturated.