BABY CAR CAMERA

RAW converter comparison:

Top row: Canon 30D / EF 35/1.4L

Bottom row: Epson R-1Ds / Nokton 40/1.4

Left two columns are capture one, right two columns are Lightroom. The left of each block is as-is from the converter, the right one of the block is my best pick (after modifications).

As you can see Lightroom creates wrong colors, especially the red is horrible bad. I walked by those red lanterns again last night and they are deep red as C1 shows it on the default export.

I am very disappointed in the Lightroom RAW engine at this point. C1, a program with a RAW engine older than the one from Lightroom does a much better job. But I guess its not the RAW engine, its the profiles for the cameras.

C1 has a large selection where you can by yourself select a camera to apply as a color profile. It seems Adobe has a lot of work to do here ... Before that you need to tweak a bit around to get the correct colors.

But just to make it clear, Lightroom in itself is perfect. The collection DB, tagging, search, the way what you can tweak per image are really awesome. It's just the result that doesn't let me switch just so ...

UPDATE:

I checked those lanterns out during day, they are actually pink. Hmm, I know that the original RAW color in C1 is pink, but C1 can convert into the colors I actually saw at night and they were dark red ...

Last night I decided to mount my Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 lens on my camera and take only that set up with me, leaving my camera bag behind. The purpose for that was to try and use that lens to photograph my subjects instead of relying on the flexibility that a zoom lens affords. Besides, I wanted to see how this fast lens would work when photographing low-light scenes like the one above. I believe it handled that quite well, although the top portion of the subject was cut off because I couldn't stand in the middle of the street, and if I had photographed the same area from across the street, much detail would have been lost.

This is the light display on Walnut Court in Santa Rosa and the homeowner boasts to using over 25,000 individual lights in it. I was actually going to use the header "wretched excess" for this photo, but I figured it is, after all, the holidays and it is a beautiful light display.

Noise reduction, color correction and sharpening all were performed in Adobe Camera Raw, which incidentally has just been updated by Adobe to version 6.3.

Technical data: aperture f/2.5, exposure 1/40th sec, ISO 200.