Originally posted by house I think you have misunderstood quite a few things. You don't loose dynamic range if you export to a 16 bit tiff and avoid any dynamic range altering tools. So a neutral profile 16 bit tiff export contains all data .
You might want to read one of these:
RAW to TIFF or PSD 16bit loses color depth - Photography Stack Exchange Are You Wasting Dynamic Range? | Blogarithms
Or just do your own tests (open a dng in ACR, export it as a tif, then apply same settings to the dng & the tif, and finally export both in jpeg). Difference is subtle but there's a loss.
Originally posted by house Exporting a single file dng from a ps dng doesn't make sense as you would have to mosaic the image again loosing the advantage of pixelshift.
I'd like to do that to use that extracted DNG to use it only on parts with movements in a PS image.
Originally posted by house I'm also curious about you highlight recovery issues because I find RT highlight recovery excellent. You need to tick the "highlight recovery" checkbox and select "color propagation" in the exposure module for best results. With extreme recovery this might break and require additional work but it's pretty darn good as is.
Maybe I'm not using RT correctly. Still, playing with the settings you talk about lead to terrible results for me.
See the following test:
Picture #1:
- opened the PS DNG in ACR
- fixed white balance
- fixed chromatic aberrations
- bumped shadows and highlights to their maximum (goal is not to get a nice picture but to illustrate the discussion)
Picture #2:
- opened the PS DNG in ACR
- exported to TIFF (with no processing)
- open the TIFF in ACR
- do the exact same processing as for picture #1
Picture #3:
- opened the PS DNG in RT
- ensured that "Highlights reconstruction" is checked (was the case)
- selected "Color propagation" as the blend method (saw no change)
- played with "Highlight compression" until the result of the image
You can download the DNG from
here (170MB) if you want to play with it.