RAW CONVERSION - QUICK TESTS

SilkyPix (Free Aug'07) v ACR (cs2) v Dimage Viewer (as supplied with A2)

I make no apologies for the colour balances being different for each conversion
 - I was just trying my best to quickly get the most pleasing image from each.
(Please note - to compare colours, whole scene from each at the bottom.)

The scene with crops highlighted:

Sky DVa2 - note smoothness...	Sky ACR - note smoothness...
Sky SilkyPix - note noisy spikes... (I did use blue sky option) NB: These are all full size crops

Bracken DVa2 ... note sharpening highlights	Bracken ACR - note poor 'red' colour
Bracken Silky.. would have sharpened more and provided even better detail

DVa2 - Distant dark area and tree detail - note gentle even noise pattern, but not much detail.

Silkypix - Great detail on trees but strange blotchy pattern in dark area (maybe this is trying to resolve trees in the dark area at the top, but the lower part of the dark area is a field, - however to me the effect is unpleasant and even worse at normal viewing size!)

ACR - slightly bigger noise spots and more prominent in the dark area than DVa2, yet no increase in detail - Note red colour gone missing again!

Granite DVa2 - texture on rock has spiky sharpening highlights - but looks effective at normal viewing size & distance.	Granite - ACR - a bit soft, but noise increase elsewhere prevented further sharpening
Granite - Silkypix - natural texture on rock and good detail

Grass DVa2 - detail halfway reasonable, but spiky sharpening highlights show again.	Grass ACR -  lacks apparent detail
Grass Silkypix - very good detail - excellent rendering. More sharpening was available and looked even better.

Dimage Viewer A2 - Whole scene

Silkypix - Whole scene

ACR - Whole scene

Generally Silkypix did the best job and would certainly have handled far more sharpening
and tweaking with this image to improve it further still. However the horrid 'mosaic' patterning
in the Silkypix's rendering of the dark area made this not a possibility.

I may try doing the Silkypix raw conversion on the photo twice - once to maximise
detail over most of the image, then blend it with a gentler tweaked version to get
the 'Dark area' acceptable.

I look forward to comments and thoughts.

Adrian