I tested four Camera RAW Developers:
- Nikon D700 In-Camera,
- Adobe Camera RAW 3.7,
- Aperture 2.1.4 Trial
- RAW Developer 1.8.5
The Test
The test was very simple. Shoot an 18% grey card that was properly exposed and see what kind of results each RAW developer produced. Each would output a JPEG file that could be examined visually and with a histogram and an rgb sampler.
The camera used was a Nikon D700 Digital SLR with a Zeiss T*2/100 mikro lens. A grey card was shot filling the entire frame. The card was in direct sunlight. Exposure control was on Aperture Priority (matrix metering). Exposure was ISO=200, f=100mm f/16 @ 1/200.
The camera was set to produce RAW+JPEG (basic, optimize size), Large image size (4256×2828).
Post-Production Flow
In-Camera RAW Converter. The JPEG produced by the camera is the output of the internal Camera RAW converter. The in-camera RAW converter is specific to the D700 and is optimized for speed. Nothing was done to the output file.
Adobe Camera RAW 3.7. Since ACR 3.7 can not recognize a D700 NEF file, it was converted to Adobe DNG using Adobe DNG Converter 4.5.0.175. The .dng file was opened in Adobe Bridge CS2 and output as a full-size JPEG using the default settings.
Apple Aperture 2. The NEF file from the camera was imported into Apple Aperture 2 using the default settings. Then it was exported to a full-size JPEG.
RAW Developer 1.8.5. The NEF was opened and then processed to output the full size JPEG. RAW Develop has camera profiles which optimize the conversion for each camera model. The Default Settings and ICC Profile for Nikon D700 were used.
All four JPEGs were imported into Aperture 2 to look at the histograms and sample the pixels rgb values.
The Results
Ideally a properly exposed grey card should produce a histogram with a narrow spike at 128,128,128. Of course you will never get the ideal. In practice, the mean will be offset and there will be a variance.
Each RAW Developer produced a different JPEG. Their histograms have different centroid, differenet spreads–different shapes. The images look different. Unfortunately Aperture can not report statistics like mean and variance. (Some histogram tools do this.)
The In-Camera RAW Developer histogram is centered approximately at 135 with a spread from about 130 to 140.
The histogram of ACR 3.7 is centered about the same as the In-Camera, but the spread is noticably wider.
Aperture 2 is way too hot, centered around 145 with a wide spread like ACR 3.7.
RAW Developer 1.8.5 is centered very close to 128 with a narrow spread similar to the In-Camera converter.
Observations & Conclusion
Each RAW Developer produces a different output file from the same RAW NEF file.
RAW Developer 1.8.5 produced the closest to the ideal histogram. This is probably because it uses camera profiles to taylor the conversion for each specific camera model.
