With my spiffy new Canon 40D, I thought I'd do some tests of my own to see what kind of noise I got in my RAW files at 3200 ISO. So I took a random shot at 3200 and loaded it onto my Mac. I also wanted to compare Aperture (my current tool of choice) with Adobe Camera Raw/Lightroom to see which one dealt with chroma noise better.
I started with Aperture and going to the Raw Fine Tuning brick. With Auto Noise Compensation turned on and both the Moire and Radius sliders all the way to their max, I could barely tell the difference.
Then I opened the same RAW file in ACR and went to noise reduction. In seconds, I had a drastically better looking photo with barely any nasty chroma noise left in the image.
Am I doing something wrong in Aperture? Or is the chroma NR really that ineffective?
I'm on the verge of switching to LR again because of this. I almost switched right before Aperture 2 came out, but Apple managed to keep me with the improved performance and better adjustment tools. But lately, I've found performance to be pretty bad if certain things have already been done to the image (i.e. cropping, straightening, or even just a few standard bricks and then zooming in, plus it's been really slow at preparing for an external editor/plug-in). The fact that Adobe seems to always be a step ahead of Aperture in terms of adjustments to RAW files is hard to overlook. I just wish I could have the interface of Aperture with the performance and adjustment tools of LR. Oh well, I guess life can't be perfect.
Just so everyone can see what I'm saying, here's the photo zoomed to 100%. The left is the unedited CR2 file, the middle is Aperture, the right is ACR. The only adjustments were chroma NR. Also, the photo was taken with a crappy lens, which accounts for the general blurriness. But this is just to show the difference in effectiveness of Aperture vs. ACR. To me, I see little to no effect with Aperture.
On an even more interesting note, I decided to bump the Aperture RAW version down to 1.1 instead of 2.0 to make use of the Chroma Blur feature they got rid of in 2.0, and it was WAY more effective. However, the way I see it, this isn't much of an option since using 1.1 takes away the other added adjustments 2.0 brings like Recovery and Black Point.
I started with Aperture and going to the Raw Fine Tuning brick. With Auto Noise Compensation turned on and both the Moire and Radius sliders all the way to their max, I could barely tell the difference.
Then I opened the same RAW file in ACR and went to noise reduction. In seconds, I had a drastically better looking photo with barely any nasty chroma noise left in the image.
Am I doing something wrong in Aperture? Or is the chroma NR really that ineffective?
I'm on the verge of switching to LR again because of this. I almost switched right before Aperture 2 came out, but Apple managed to keep me with the improved performance and better adjustment tools. But lately, I've found performance to be pretty bad if certain things have already been done to the image (i.e. cropping, straightening, or even just a few standard bricks and then zooming in, plus it's been really slow at preparing for an external editor/plug-in). The fact that Adobe seems to always be a step ahead of Aperture in terms of adjustments to RAW files is hard to overlook. I just wish I could have the interface of Aperture with the performance and adjustment tools of LR. Oh well, I guess life can't be perfect.
Just so everyone can see what I'm saying, here's the photo zoomed to 100%. The left is the unedited CR2 file, the middle is Aperture, the right is ACR. The only adjustments were chroma NR. Also, the photo was taken with a crappy lens, which accounts for the general blurriness. But this is just to show the difference in effectiveness of Aperture vs. ACR. To me, I see little to no effect with Aperture.
On an even more interesting note, I decided to bump the Aperture RAW version down to 1.1 instead of 2.0 to make use of the Chroma Blur feature they got rid of in 2.0, and it was WAY more effective. However, the way I see it, this isn't much of an option since using 1.1 takes away the other added adjustments 2.0 brings like Recovery and Black Point.