Hi Paul and Godfrey,
I have not used ACR that much, but when I tried it for the week with
my cameras (caveat - the cameras might matter a lot - Nikons so it
might be different with Pentax DSLRs), I found this:
1) colour was different from Nikon's program or C1 (both were truer).
Shadows had a nasty tint. This could be perhaps correctably by
tweaking the calibrate tab, but that is too much experimentation given the other
things below.
2) WRT shadow contrast - both Nikon's own and C1 had quite better
shadow contrast, even after tweaking the sliders a bit. ACR had a
higher "base fog" level, and as above, it was tinted to green.
3) Noise pattern. With colour noise removal on, the high iso files
were very blotchy - some desaturated pixels were very visible as
random luminance pepper noise, uglier than the former colour noise.
Sharpening only increased this a lot, of course. thus chroma noise
reduction resulted in pepper noise which was impossible to remove
later, IMO. Luminance noise reduction blurred the details, but almost
every one does that, I generally don't use them.
That's about it. The controls can be get used to, I believe.
What I liked that the control of blown highlights worked better than
in C1.
As the workflow, I have usually files that are best corrected in small
batches, and workflow of the type used in RSE and C1 is the best for
this. Your mileage might vary but for me, it would be much faster to
quickly scroll trough all the files using mousewheel and adjusting
each group of similar ones a tiny bit, or even adjusting each of the
selects slightly differently. It is much quicker to just scroll trough
the thumnails using mousewheel and drag a slider a bit than having to
open each file from File Browser into ACR and saving the settings
there.
The new CS 2 with Bridge and new ACR might change that, from the
screenshots I saw it looks like they finally implemented a direct
adjustment filmstrip mode, but we will see, and anyway it will be yet
another expense I don't have finances for :(
Good light!
fra
