I've been using Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) for as long as it's been nicely integrated in to Photoshop. It makes various aspects of my workflow a bit easier. I have also used Capture 1 (C1) and Canon's Digital Photo Professional (DPP).

I can't say which is the best, I've gotten comfortable with ACR so that certainly helps but it doesn't mean it's the right choice. Everyone says I often have a green issue, lots of the images I convert are too green. This could very well just be my eyes but I have no way of knowing for the most part.

My friend Joe just tried ACR now that it supports the files from his D3. He also found it to be too green in certain ways. But he liked the results from it as well as from C1 and Nikons NX software. Each one had different parts of the image he liked.

He was shooting at the same time and in the same general area as where I took this photo:



So his conditions and lighting were the same since he was on the other side of that building, shooting it.

I'm beginning to wonder does ACR do something that makes my conversions too green? Has anyone else experienced that or is it something I'm doing wrong (and perhaps Joe did wrong)? It seems the RAW file he has, without any adjustments, looked different initially in each converter which isn't a huge surprise because each has different algorithms. What concerns me a bit further is that even at that stage ACR seemed extra green.

So if that's the case, that ACR might be green, what are you using? Can you or have you compared the software?

Originally Posted by emorphien

what are you using?

JPEGs.









if I do shoot RAWs, it's always photoshop.

OK, so you use ACR. I wish I had made a poll for this. Oops.

I don't know that these images will be really all that helpful, since I just opened them and resized them in both programs, nothing else. The difference I see is in the PPing--NX seems to render the NEFs more smoothly/cleanly than does CS3 with less work.

Anyway, here they are:

Capture NX


Photoshop


To my eye, the Capture version is brighter and more vibrant.

The capture version also looks oversaturated to me. Bumping up the saturation and adjusting the curves in ACR would probably match them a bit better. I'm liking (personally) the colors from ACR better than NX.

I'd agree the nikon version is (over?)saturated, but I like it...
I can see what you're saying Mark. I agree it's better, but I bet with a little playing around with settings, you can get the exact same output from ACR.

I like the saturation in the sky from NX but the building in the reflection in the window looks oversaturated to me.

I agree, but that's not to say I don't like it...

Bridge? I don't think I understand enough about it to answer very well.

ACR exclusively for me. I've never noticed any color issues on calibrated monitors and the prints I've been getting from mpix match what I'm expecting exactly.