phototestcenter.com              RAW  

Canon EOS 5D - 1600 ISO

Image Quality :  1600 ISO  :  All shown at 100%

Once again RAWshooter is best - it has the second lowest noise level - Bibble Pro with Noise Ninja is best - and it recorded most detail. ACDSee and Bibble Pro are second equal with good detail and effective noise reduction - I turned noise reduction on in all the packages for the 1600 ISO tests.  Adobe Camera RAW noise levels are now very high with large numbers of tiny black dots appearing on the wooden prow of the boat. Although you can increase noise reduction and then increase sharpness again, it would still be last at this speed.  Capture One again lost out on detail with it’s automatic noise reduction turned on. Surprisingly, even with this sacrifice of detail, it was still third noisiest.  DPP with noise reduction set to medium wasn’t great here either with high noise levels and lots of strange artifacts appearing over out of focus areas.

Conclusion

RAWshooter wins almost every category, and is the easiest to use, so is the obvious overall choice for Canon EOS 5D RAW files.  Adobe’s Camera RAW doesn’t perform nearly as well with Canon files as it does with Nikon, especially at high ISO’s where all the others are better.  Capture One would be an excellent choice for portraiture with it’s softer look and automatic noise reduction system.  Bibble Pro is much improved and the inclusion of Noise Ninja Basic is a real boost at high ISO’s where it’s excellent. ACDSee Pro 8’s RAW processing is actually quite good with no real areas of weakness and a far nicer interface than most.  It also handles more cameras than most packages.

RAWshooter Premium 2006 - Best package for the Canon EOS 5D

Update

Since This review was written, many of the packages have been updated. In particular Canon’s own Digital Photo Professional now has better noise reduction and built in corrections for vignetting and distortion with most current Canon lenses. These features in any package would be great, but in a free package they are just superb. DPP is still much slower than the best, but in comparison to what any other camera maker gives you with the camera, Canon are in a league of their own. If you only need to process a small number of files, all you need is there.

However, if speed is important, Capture One v4 is excellent, and although results are not quite as good as from DPP, the quality difference is very small, and is only really noticeable at low ISO’s, while Capture One is one of the best there is for usability. If you need to process a lot of files quickly, Capture One v4 the best option. High ISO users like me will also benefit from the much more sophisticated noise reduction that Capture One v4 offers.

RawShooter Essentials 2006, the last free version of RawShooter, although no longer officially available, can still be downloaded. Just Google RawShooter in the box below.  Although missing some features from RawShooter Premium 2006 it still does a great job, and is free.

All text and images copyright David Gold 2006 - 2009
and must not be reproduced in any way without permission
davidgold@ezeedsl.co.uk