ACR 5 and CS4 vs. Bibble photo critique please...

[lextalionis]

Hey gang,

I've been using Bibble Pro 4.9 for over a year now and I've just started using CS4 along with ACR 5. I've had to do a lot of tweaking with ACR 5 to get the results I like. I even ran a calibration script with a GretagMacbeth color checker with Pro Photo 16bit color depth and the results were horrible. So I've manually tweaked my calibration in ACR 5 using sRGB 16bit. I like the the ACR 5 version of these balloons a bit better, what do you think about the color and hues? Which one do you like best?

One last note...if you download these and open them in a viewer that shows the color histogram, you'll notice that the ACR 5 version has a more robust curve (aka more data) whereas the Bibble version has less; however, what's strange is that the ACR 5 version is considerably smaller in file size...humm go figure?

#1 Version rendered from a Canon 30D RAW in ACR 5 16bit sRGB and using the latest Camera Standard beta 2 Camera profile from Adobe with only Red Saturation at -14, all other sliders for color at zero. Normal exposure settings used such as brightness set at 50 and contrast set at 20 (normal for ACR right?). Then opened in CS4 and one default pass of Noiseware Pro and USM of radius 1 amt 35% (I like using USM in CS4 more than in ACR):


#2 Version using Bibble Pro 4.9 only...used my standard values for sat, exp, sharpening, NR etc...CR2 directly to 100% quality jpg:


Thanks for the advice/help.
-Roy

[MicWayWal]

I think the colors look a little milky and washed out. #1 is better than #2 but still there is not a complete saturation of color that there could be. I punched them up with levels and they look much better. I would adjust the curve in RAW or with Levels before doing anything else.

[lextalionis]

Thanks Michel...still tweaking and getting used to ACR. I will say for sure that the first few trys with ACR yielded very washed out colors.

-Roy

[blssdwlf]

I played with the JPG and found that I could get some more saturation in the colors of #1 by adjusting the Blacks value. Seems like the white point was set ok, but you could get a little more aggressive with the Blacks value. I was able to increase the Blacks up to as high as 15, so I imagine you could go more aggressive with it in your RAW file. I'd leave the Brightness at 50 and Contrast at 25.

The balloon on the right in #1 looks more orangish than the red in #2 most likely from your Red Saturation -14 setting. Is your 30D blowing out the red channel with the DNG profiles? I found that I could leave the red channel at 0 on my XTI with the DNG profiles.