Photo Ninja

[Ysarex]

You're all probably aware of PictureCode's noise filtering software Noise Ninja. In the last 1/2 dozen years it's become the default quality standard in the industry.

A couple months ago PictureCode released Photo Ninja which is a raw file converter. (Noise Ninja is integrated into Photo Ninja.)

Many of you know that I'm a retired college prof. who still teaches a couple classes part-time. As such I have to teach the industry default Adobe products and for raw processing that's ACR/LR. Personally I've been using Capture One for most of my work but I'll occasionally defaut back to DPP or ACR if I know I'll get the result I'm looking for. (No two raw converters are alike.) Because my students come to class with every known camera make and model we tend to keep copies of Capture NX and Sony's raw converter installed at the college just so we can help those students. For students on a budget we have copies of Raw Therapee and UFRaw, and, because our labs are MAC based, Aperture. Point is: I'm pretty familiar with a range of raw converters and the last thing I need is another one.

Last weekend I downloaded the Photo Ninja trial -- figured I'd take a look and keep myself current. So for the past week I've been running side by side tests through Photo Ninja and Capture One mostly. Friday I got out the credit card and bought Photo Ninja; apparently I do need another raw converter.

Photo Ninja is superb. It just may be the best raw converter available if all you care about is IQ. All I care about is IQ and so I had to have it. In the real world of you folks who do this commercially IQ of course isn't the only consideration. If you use LR and rely on it's database management support then Photo Ninja's very competent file browser is not a replacement. It's only 3 months old at this writing so it warrants watching.

Right now Photo Ninja provides the core functions you'd expect from a raw converter. Thinking about ACR/LR for comparison, Photo Ninja lacks any type of local adjustment control like you get from the adjustment brush etc. I've always preferred to do that work in Photoshop so I'm happy but folks using only LR again would find Photo Ninja lacking as a replacement.

Where Photo Ninja shines:

Hands down the best CA correction I've ever seen.
Best in class noise filtering.
Lens distortion and perspective adjustment are superb.
Tone response control is magnificently implemented. Those of you who try and squeeze that last extra bit of tonal information from a raw capture will quickly fall in love with Photo Ninja.
Local color adjustment is very good.
Nice surprise: if you have a standard color target Photo Ninja can profile your camera.

An added note: When I downloaded Photo Ninja the download went so quickly I figured it was one of those launchers that then continues by downloading more data during the installation. I was wrong. The entire download is just a 12 mb file. Compare that with the recent upgrade of Capture One 7 which is a 230 mb file. Photo Ninja is the work of just two programers: Jim Christian and Bill Smith and these guys know how to write clean, elegant code -- it's obvious in use. Photo Ninja is alarmingly fast and nimble; we're talking sports car here.

Here's three sample images processed through Photo Ninja; they are all full resolution files so you can pixel peep.

1. Corner bar: http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2012/316/f/5/bar_by_skoparon-d5krycx.jpg
The original is from my compact camera: Samsung EX2.

2. Backlit park: http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2012/315/6/e/park_by_skoparon-d5knmdf.jpg
Took a backlit shot as a high contrast test on my walk Friday, again the EX2. Photo Ninja handles high contrast lighting magnificently. I am impressed!

3. Hardin bridge: http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2012/315/9/6/bridge_by_skoparon-d5knm01.jpg
This is from my Canon 5DmkII. See that tree branch on the right. CA in the original is pretty bad. ACR and Capture One do an OK job with it and DPP does a better job with it but none of them can rival this. I am impressed!

Joe

 

[fjrabon]

care to post the same images with ACR? I've been very intrigued by photo ninja since I heard about it.

 

[ann]

thanks for the tip.

I may give it a trial run; only maybe as i recently have started using DxO optics with my OMD-Em5.

Too much software and little use

 

[Ysarex]

care to post the same images with ACR? I've been very intrigued by photo ninja since I heard about it.

Well I ran my comparisons against Capture One and now they've gone and released a major upgrade for that (version 7) and I ponied up for that and now I'm testing that and I'm kinda raw from all this testing. But I'll do you one better: Here's all three raw file originals I used in the above post. You can run them through ACR yourself and see what you think and even post them back here.

The bar
The park
The bridge

Those are FTP links and you'll be prompted for a login. The user ID is: Zeiss and the password is: 80-planar

The SRW files are from my Samsung EX2. If your version of ACR won't read them then you can just convert them to DNG. Photo Ninja doesn't read them and that's what I had to do to process them. Photo Ninja does read DNG.

As I continue to explore Photo Ninja I'm discovering it really excels for high contrast scenes. That backlit photo in the park is a good test.

Joe

 

[Tareq935]

Very useful article. Thank you sir.