[Arrvon]

Hi All,

I have until now shot most of my pics in Jpeg and the few that I shot in RAW I converted using the standing Pentax Photo Laobratory. This process resulted in jpeg's that looked very very close to the ones coming straight out of the camera.

The photo laboratory program as we all know however is not very east to use...so I took a look at some alternatives and ended up purchasing Corel's Paint Shot Pro X2 Ultimate edition which I found on their website for a whopping $39.99. I couldn't resist the price so I purchased it.

I've been playing around with the new program and started converting some of my RAW's to Jpeg. Of course I noticed right away that they did not look anywhere near as good as the ones converted using the Pentax program...

My question is, does anyone here know what kind of extra changes the Pentax program is doing and how best I can match that with my new PSP program? My goal is simply to get RAW conversions to look the same from the PSP program as the Pentax or jpeg's right out of the camera.

I couldn't find any real tips using the search function other than people advising to play around with the settings until they were matched. Does anyone know however, what exactly the Pentax program is doing with the RAW's to make them look so much better?

Thanks for any help!

[lithos]

I've noticed this, too. In Photoshop, reds seem more orange, there are other colour shifts as well, and there's a slight loss in saturation.

My messsing with the settings only ends up with the images looking dirtier...

[Marc Sabatella]

Give up on the goal of mking them look "the same" - that's never going to happen, any more than two cooks would ever produce *exactly* the same dish even starting with the same ingredients. That's just the nature of RAW - there will be differences in how the data is "cooked" by different programs.

Instead, focus on making them look as good. And *don't* fall into the trap of lookng at the in-camera version first and subconsciously setting that on a pedestal and not accepting anything else as being as good. Do a blind comparison nd see if you really do always prefer one over the other. It's pretty doubtful. Even if one always produces, say, reds that are a bit more orange than the other, that's going to be a good thing half the time, and a bad thing half the time.

On the other hand, I don't know that PSP would offer any advantages over PPL to make the switch worth your while. If a program doesn't feature a non-destructive / parametric image editing facility - a mechanism that automatically keeps track of all your adjustments without rewquiring you you covnert to another format, that allow to simply copy setting from file to file while still allowing for further custom tweaking, etc - then there's really no point in switching if you like the results from PPL, as the workflow will remain exactly as cumbersome.

[Arrvon]

Thanks for the replies.

Marc you're analogy with the two cooks does ring very true. I agree with all of what you are saying and in the end i'm not really looking to match the photos exactly. It would still be nice to try and get an idea of what the Pentax post processing RAW to Jpeg is doing. I'm assuming that it is tweaking a lot of different settings including colors. I'm wondering if it has ever been posted or declared exactly or even roughly what Pentax is doing to convert their RAW to Jpeg.

Does anyone have any approximate tips on how to get similar looking images?

PS. Marc, I am still very new to PSP but it does appear to have a "script" function in which you can save and then apply a series of changes to one or a batch of RAW photos.

[Alfisti]

This is where Lightroom is kick arse. You can use one of 5 or 6 profiles designed to try and mimic the Pentax camera engine or you can personally tweak the profiles to try and match it yourself. Then you go to Mithandir's thread in this forum and use his pre-sets to see what works best for you.

get Lightroom, get it now.