Help! My DNG-converted-JPEG is not the same the OOC JPEG.

[jaapv]

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It is not just the crop. it is also (mainly) distortion correction

[Viv]

1 hour ago, LRookie said:

Thank you for your response Viv. If it is only a couple of photos,  I do not mind to do the cropping. I normally take hundreds of photos from each vacation so I am not too thrilled to crop every single one of of them.

Understood!

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[iRandom]

This is simply a matter of being new to RAW development and not yet knowing how to use a particular software application. No need to consider other SW or refunds just yet.

For Luminar4 you just need to select the Canvas toolset (icon on the RHS) and enable the optical corrections. Unfortunately, I don't think there is an option to turn this on by default. As jaapv said, cropping will not remove the optical distortion. It will only remove the dark corners and I think that you will find that the amount of vignetting can vary from photo to photo. The one you showed is quite minor compared to some I've seen from my Q2.

Your conversion still won't look the same as the JPG since there are various settings involved that will differ between the camera and the SW. Some applications have camera matching profiles to better replicate the OOC JPG. I don't think that Luminar does. I think you have a 60 day money back guarantee. Take that time to learn the SW and if you find it doesn't fit your needs request the refund.You may realize along the way that you prefer to stick with the JPGs.

If you are a Mac user I find that Photos does a nice baseline conversion. You can even use Luminar4 as an extension if you want to do more than Photos offers.

Edited December 3, 2019 by iRandom

[Lou Walter Wilson]

5 hours ago, LRookie said:

This is the DNG-converted-JPEG. Notice the black vignette ...

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With the Leica Q DNG file got the  black vignette when I went directly into Luminar 4 but when I used Luminar 4 as a plugin with Lightroom I do not get it. 

[jaapv]

Thinking about this I would advise you to get Photoshop Elements as a beginning of the postprocessing journey.

[jaapv]

That is exactly the problem; You are using ACR and exporting to Luminar 4, if you are using L4 as standalone you are depending on its native raw conversion engine. See post #9.

[Leica Guy]

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12 hours ago, LRookie said:

Thank you for your response Viv. If it is only a couple of photos,  I do not mind to do the cropping. I normally take hundreds of photos from each vacation so I am not too thrilled to crop every single one of of them.

I strongly recommend you adopt Lightroom or some other similar quality post processing program. You’ve got a great camera. Shoot RAW. Invest the time in learning a good Post program. Post process and you’ll get the most out of your images. Lightroom and Photoshop have served me very well for 15 years. Look forward to seeing your posts. 

[jaapv]

Think of it this way: If you were shooting film with your Leica, you would not accept Wallmart prints; you would do it yourself or use a quality lab.

[LRookie]

I've read everyone's input/advice/comment and was thinking very hard about what I want to do next.
 
Before I have the Q2, I've used (and still use) a Fuji mirrorless camera system. Fuji camera gives quite nice finised color on the JPEGs so I never had the need to use an editing software or shooting RAW.
      
Since I have Q2, I thought it might be time I get myself into shooting RAW as I kept hearing all the wonderful things RAW files can have on the final JPEGs.  

To shoot RAW, I need an editing software to do post processing.        

I was juggling between Luminar vs Lightroom. I am an amateur photographer and photography is only my hobby to take my mind off from my busy working life. So I decided to go for Luminar4, thinking it might be an easy post processing tool for me. 
     
I've always thought Lightroom is more for advanced photography post-processing. It is too sophisticated, too complicated, too difficult to use. Lightroom's user interface does look a bit overwhelming and intimidating for someone, who is neither keen to do post processing nor want to get stuck behind a computer for hours. So I opted for Luminar4 without knowing that L4 does not convert DNGs so well.               

Admittedly, I find Luminar4 very easy and user friendly for a beginner. After watching some Luminar4 Utubes, I was able to get the hang of it and edit comfortably some of my JPEGs from Fuji & Q2. L4 has some amazing features like AI sky replacement, which I heard is very difficult and requires a lot of fiddling to get the same result in Lightroom.
   
However, if I want to get into shooting RAW in the long run, Luminar4 might not be a long term solution. I really do not want to keep cropping or fix optical distortion for all the photos I am taking.
     
So it all come down to choosing between Photoshop Elements (PSE) vs Lightroom. Pardon me for my ingnorance but I have never of heard of PSE before this post. I've heard a lot about Lr though (who hasn't!). I am not really interested in Capture One or any other editing software. 
           
So I googled and found this article Lightroom vs Photoshop Elements by Romanas Naryškin. 

After reading this article a few times, my first thought was to chose PSE. Again, more like because it is simple, easy to use, does not take a lot of time to learn, suitable for me as, at the moment, I have a very busy full time job and does not have much time to learn a complicated photography software properly. 

I always think that one day when I am retired from the workforce, I would do full time photography and devote more time in learning Lightroom. Only, that one day will be at least 30 years from now (God help me).   
    
So, PSE might be an ideal solution for now. 
 
But, wait a minute, after reading the above article a few more times yet, before I pull the plug for PSE, I kept seeing this paragraph dancing in the back of my mind 'PSE is not suitable for editing a large number of RAW files quickly and simultaneously'. And I do take hundreds of photos every time I go on vacation.

I know that one day when I am good at doing post processing, PSE will not be good enough anymore. I would be craving for more and want to go for a more challenging editing software, which is the ultimate Lightroom. 

As people say, All roads lead to ROME. Instead of running around trying to find an easy way out, why not jump right into and face it while I am still young and have a good mind to learn.
  
So this is my plan moving forward:

- I will keep Luminar4 as I have already learnt a fair bit about the software. Will keep editing my JPEGs using L4 for the rest of this year.  

- I will be taking 4 week vacation in Jan 2020, which I intend to shoot JPEG+RAW using Q2 exlusively.

- After I get back from my vacation, I will install Lightroom on my computer and start processing all my DNGs using Lightroom. There will be a lot of learning curves there, but I should not put it off any longer. The sooner I get into it, the better I will be in the long run. 
  
- Once I got Lr on my computer, Luminar4 will be used as a plugin or for some light JPEG editings on the days I do not feel like using Lightroom. 

This plan would work well for me.    

Finally, I would like to thank jaapv, Viv, iRandom, Lou Walter Wilson and Leica Guy for all your enthusiastic advices. You are all being so wonderful and awesome. I am a big fan of this forum. There is so much to learn and this forum gives me a lot of opportunites to do just that. 

Many thanks and wishing you all the best.

 

Edited December 4, 2019 by LRookie

[Leica Guy]

You are maturing as a photographer. Pat yourself on the back. My very honest and sincere advice is to jump into LR at your first opportunity. It’s the place you want to be long term. It is fantastic at managing a large number of photos. I have 135,000 in my library and LR organizes them for quick retrieval because I’ve been disciplined to always add keywords. For the first six months forget about Photoshop. You don’t need it and it’s a whole other level of learning. Eventually you’ll learn to really appreciate what it will do for you, but initially LR has plenty of capability for post processing your RAW files or DNG’s or jpeg’s for that matter. Over the years Adobe has added a lot of post processing (Develop module) capabilities. 
 

We all have struggled at times balancing demanding work and family responsibilities versus our personal pursuits. Investing slowly into learning LR will serve you very well and actually increase your photography productivity. Lastly, there are great youtube videos explaining LR. Yes, it’s a powerful program, but it’s very much possible within a few hours to get it up and running and learn the basics of how to process photos. BTW, the best value Adobe Photography plan is $9.99 / mo. They have many options and want you to buy a higher level plan. I advise that you only need the basic plan. It includes LR Classic (which I highly recommend and use), LR (cloud based which is good if you want syncing across multiple platforms like iPads, iPhones, computers), and Photoshop. All for $9.99 / mo. USD. 

Good luck. It’s fun. 
 

PS. I’m simply giving my opinion. Others may steer you other directions. I respect that. What I said is what has served me very well for 15 years including before I retired and also had very limited personal time available. 

Edited December 4, 2019 by Leica Guy

[iRandom]

One thing to keep in mind when looking at Lightroom is that there is Rome and there is Constantinople 🙁

It seems like you have been referring to Lightroom Classic (formally called Lightroom Creative Cloud Classic, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Lightroom) which is the one that has been around for more than 10 years. This is the one that is best suited for batch editing and has more features due to it's long history.

There's also the more cloud-centric Lightroom (formally called Lightroom Creative Cloud). This is the newer product and is more akin to Luminar and MacOS Photos in my opinion. It is not as full featured as LR Classic and the batch editing may be lacking (this has been improving).

The reason why I'm saying all this is that you need to be aware of which is which if and when you get a subscription. LR Classic comes in the Photography plan ($9.99) which includes both flavors of LR, Photoshop and 20GB of cloud storage (good enough for syncing Smart Previews to enable working across all your devices). The other package, which is called the Lightroom plan ($9.99), is the newer LR and 1TB  of cloud storage. This package doesn't include LR Classic or PS.

[Leica Guy]

2 minutes ago, iRandom said:

One thing to keep in mind when looking at Lightroom is that there is Rome and there is Constantinople 🙁

It seems like you have been referring to Lightroom Classic (formally called Lightroom Creative Cloud Classic, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Lightroom) which is the one that has been around for more than 10 years. This is the one that is best suited for batch editing and has more features due to it's long history.

There's also the more cloud-centric Lightroom (formally called Lightroom Creative Cloud). This is the newer product and is more akin to Luminar and MacOS Photos in my opinion. It is not as full featured as LR Classic and the batch editing may be lacking (this has been improving).

The reason why I'm saying all this is that you need to be aware of which is which if and when you get a subscription. LR Classic comes in the Photography plan ($9.99) which includes both flavors of LR, Photoshop and 20GB of cloud storage (good enough for syncing Smart Previews to enable working across all your devices). The other package, which is called the Lightroom plan ($9.99), is the newer LR and 1TB  of cloud storage. This package doesn't include LR Classic or PS.

Great add. Thanks for expanding and correcting my comments. 

[danielmfrank]

On 12/3/2019 at 1:26 AM, LRookie said:

Hi All,

I am not sure if there is a topic on this so I am  going to post my problem here in the hope someone can help me.

I am a newbie and just got my Leica Q2 a couple of months ago. I normally shoot JPEG only and never try to shoot RAW because I did not yet have an editing software on my computer.

I recently purchased Luminar 4 and want to try out DNG files. To my dismay, the JPEG converted from DNG using Luminar 4 came out not as the same as the OOC JPEG. 

The DNG photo looks like it has black vignette at the four corners of the photo. A closer look at both photos showed that OOC JPEG looks like a cropped version of the DNG Photo. It is a smaller photo in comparision to DNG Photo with the vignette has been cropped (?).

Could someone pls explain why it is so? Not sure if Luminar4 does that or Leica DNG RAW file is supposed to be like that. Is there something in the Q2 I should set so the DNG photo does not come out with the vignette?  Otherwise I have to cropped away the vignette for every photo I am taking in RAW.

Below is OOC JPEG. I am posting DNG converted JPEG in the following post.  Your advice is very much appreciated.. Thank you and best regards.

I just found out that I am allowed to post 1 post/day so I have to post the other photo the 'next day' :(.

 

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!

One other point to note here: The lens on the Q and Q2 is actually about a 24mm focal length. Because it heavily depends on software distortion correction (SDC) the sensor has to capture a larger area, because the SDC is going to shrink the image along the edges to do interpolation for the SDC, then crop whatever is left over. Lightroom automatically applies the SDC opcodes in the DNG file, whereas Luminar apparently does not apply them. I don't think it's an XMP issue; XMP is a sidecar file, which doesn't come with the DNG.

At 24mm, the lens distorts and heavily vignettes in the corners. All that is processed out by the SDC. You're seeing the image in its native form.

[danielmfrank]

On 12/3/2019 at 2:24 AM, LRookie said:

That is just so terrible. I just purchased Luminar 4 and now I can not use it.  Skylum should really implement a better DNG converter in Luminar 4.

Does Luminar have optical distortion correction sliders? If you have that, a vignette tool, and a crop tool, you can probably manually create a preset that does most or all of what the SDC opcodes do.

[jaapv]

4 hours ago, danielmfrank said:

One other point to note here: The lens on the Q and Q2 is actually about a 24mm focal length. Because it heavily depends on software distortion correction (SDC) the sensor has to capture a larger area, because the SDC is going to shrink the image along the edges to do interpolation for the SDC, then crop whatever is left over. Lightroom automatically applies the SDC opcodes in the DNG file, whereas Luminar apparently does not apply them. I don't think it's an XMP issue; XMP is a sidecar file, which doesn't come with the DNG.

At 24mm, the lens distorts and heavily vignettes in the corners. All that is processed out by the SDC. You're seeing the image in its native form.

The SDC file is contained as embedded file within the DNG as a sidecar file to the raw data. Luminar does not read this file.

Luminar was aware of the issue and promised an update two years ago, but since then they have decided that they use a "pure raw conversion" (??)

 

[iRandom]

Luminar doesn't use the SDC info by default, but it will use it if you click the checkbox in the Canvas menu (what an awful name for this particular menu). It would be nice to be able to enable this by default.

Luminar also doesn't use the embedded crop info if you are using digital zoom on the Q/Q2 whereas LR does. I don't there is an option in LR to use this info.

[jaapv]

23 hours ago, iRandom said:

One thing to keep in mind when looking at Lightroom is that there is Rome and there is Constantinople 🙁

It seems like you have been referring to Lightroom Classic (formally called Lightroom Creative Cloud Classic, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Lightroom) which is the one that has been around for more than 10 years. This is the one that is best suited for batch editing and has more features due to it's long history.

There's also the more cloud-centric Lightroom (formally called Lightroom Creative Cloud). This is the newer product and is more akin to Luminar and MacOS Photos in my opinion. It is not as full featured as LR Classic and the batch editing may be lacking (this has been improving).

The reason why I'm saying all this is that you need to be aware of which is which if and when you get a subscription. LR Classic comes in the Photography plan ($9.99) which includes both flavors of LR, Photoshop and 20GB of cloud storage (good enough for syncing Smart Previews to enable working across all your devices). The other package, which is called the Lightroom plan ($9.99), is the newer LR and 1TB  of cloud storage. This package doesn't include LR Classic or PS.

Which is exactly why I recommend Photoshop Elements 2020 to beginners - it does all one needs for basic to medium postprocessing and is of the same quality level as Photoshop CC and the Lightrooms.

[LRookie]

4 hours ago, jaapv said:

Which is exactly why I recommend Photoshop Elements 2020 to beginners - it does all one needs for basic to medium postprocessing and is of the same quality level as Photoshop CC and the Lightrooms.

jaapv, how good does PSE convert PNG files into JPGs?  Does PSE convert DNGs the same quality as Photoshop CC and the Lightrooms? What I mean is does it have that vignetting effect on photos like Luminar 4? I tried to google this bit of info but cant seem to locate it. 

[jaapv]

Yes. All three use ACR, the raw conversion program of Adobe. Download the trial and see for yourself.

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Hallo,

Look here: Leica Q

[PhotoCruiser]

Just one warning about the last versions of at least Lightroom Classic and using a Windows PC and HiRes Monitors

I have the really annoying eyedropper offset bug, basically the eyedropper for white balance will not pick the color at the tip rather on the middle of the eyedropper tool.
Adobe is aware of this bug for at least 3 years but is not able/willing to fix that annoying problem.

In my case working on a Lenovo P70 with 4K screen i am not able to solve this problem with reducing resolution (bt: it would be rediculous to edit pix at for example 1240x800)

In this moment i am evaluating to switch to a other program to replace Lightroom and cancel my CC subscriptions even if i work with Lightroom from Version 1 on,
but the white balance tool is very important in underwater photography.

I have Photoshop and Premiere Elements and with those i can do 90% of the editing tasks i need to do.

As jaapv already wrote, Adobe uses their own CAMERA RAW converter tool to open DNG files in Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom and Bridge and it a great converter.

Chris

EDIT:

To make sure that i am not bashing all versions of Lightroom i reinstalled Lightroom (CC) Version 3 and there the white balance tool works as supposed,
but it's not a eyedropper, its a crosshair pointer.

 

 

Edited December 5, 2019 by PhotoCruiser