SPP Versus Iridient Developer

[Sapphie]

I do like Iridient Developer. In fact it was my first RAW application on my Mac. It is great that it supports the Merrills now. If for no other reason that it is so fast to browse and render compared with SPP. For some images it does very well in actually rendering the files. However, SPP has some real magic that I can't seem to re-create in ID. Take for example a rocky land/sea scape with lots of detailed rocks, grass, turf, heather, small boulders etc. SPP, with NR down low, produces an image on-screen that makes me think I am almost there and can climb the landscape in front of me. Sometimes it can even make the look a little surreal but it produces a look that is so 3 dimensional. How?

With ID and the OOC JPegs there is detail there for sure but the image doesn't jump off the screen in the same way.

I tend to overexpose on my DP2M up to 0.7, sometimes even more. SPP can very often recover detail in the overexposed sky that looks stunning - clouds never looked so good.

In general the SPP rendering produces such amazingly clear, clean images with none of that typical 'haze'.

If anyone knows how to make ID look as good as SPP, then I'd love to know how!

Lee

 

[scho]

I do like Iridient Developer. In fact it was my first RAW application on my Mac. It is great that it supports the Merrills now. If for no other reason that it is so fast to browse and render compared with SPP. For some images it does very well in actually rendering the files. However, SPP has some real magic that I can't seem to re-create in ID. Take for example a rocky land/sea scape with lots of detailed rocks, grass, turf, heather, small boulders etc. SPP, with NR down low, produces an image on-screen that makes me think I am almost there and can climb the landscape in front of me. Sometimes it can even make the look a little surreal but it produces a look that is so 3 dimensional. How?

With ID and the OOC JPegs there is detail there for sure but the image doesn't jump off the screen in the same way.

I tend to overexpose on my DP2M up to 0.7, sometimes even more. SPP can very often recover detail in the overexposed sky that looks stunning - clouds never looked so good.

In general the SPP rendering produces such amazingly clear, clean images with none of that typical 'haze'.

If anyone knows how to make ID look as good as SPP, then I'd love to know how!

Lee

I had high hopes for ID, but was also not pleased with the rendering It produces some serious green/magenta color casts that I could not correct. Great for B&W conversions with the embedded sigma monochrome profile, but otherwise too many problems with full color.

 

[andrewteee]

My experience in looking at Sigma Merrill RAW files in Iridient Developer leads me to believe that SPP is making up for some of the oddities in the Foveon sensor. There are pictures where I get more apparent detail in ID than in SPP, but I also see banding and odd color splotches at higher ISO. Even at ISO 100 there seems to be a little noise apparent in ID.

I have not decided which gives me better results. They're just different. ID is much more fun to use! And it gives me more options to process the image. Earlier, I would process a nice looking B&W TIFF in SPP and further process in ID, but I was then trying to leave SPP behind. Not there yet.