Digital BW, The Print

> From: Steve Kale [mailto:stevekale@...]
>
> I have asked this question before but since you are a fan of C1 I will ask
> again:  what are the advantages/disadvantages of C1 vs the free
> Adobe Camera RAW?

1) C1 has a better conversion engine than probably anyone else. However,
most images don't push the limits of any converter, so ACR is fine on them.
It's when you come up against very wide dynamic range images that C1 shines,
partly because it does a better job of suppressing banding in shadow areas,
partly because it creates fewer strange artifacts from random sensor noise.
It also uses an actual ICC profile to describe each camera, for more
accurate color.

2) Unfortunately, C1 doesn't have vignetting and CA correction. The former
can be done afterwards in Photoshop, but CA correction really is best done
in the raw converter. For images that have visible CA, ACR has a significant
advantage.

3) C1 is optimized for a batch workflow. It works well if you need to
convert all of your images from a shoot into some standard file format like
TIFF, with little editing beyond white balance tweaking. For certain kinds
of jobs, that's probably very useful. If you need to do further editing,
then you're stuck with running the images through two separate pieces of
software. If instead you would prefer to treat raw files like any other file
format, and open them individually and randomly, then ACR is more
convenient, because you open each file directly into your editor. Also, it
takes C1 a really long time to open a folder if it has a lot of images in
it, making it tedious to use for one-at-a-time editing.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@...