Automatic Image Optimization: Part 2, Available Light

This picture I took just a couple of weeks ago. It shows the Congress Center in Davos where the World Economic Forum will take place next week. Hopefully this is suitable for testing on available-light-shots. With this lighting, we have to be aware of complementary colors (deep blue sky and yellow lights) as well as of deep shadows. I was surprised to see only one software interpreting the blue sky correctly.

It is Image Editor´s result that almost look identical to what I had manually modified the picture to. Overall nice and correct colors, good details in the shadows: Perfect! All other apps tend to put more reds in my photo. Judging from contrast and shadows, DxO is second to best. Despite the color of the sky it´s very close to my own result. Same goes for FixFoto except for being darker and thus losing details in the shadows. Intellihance´s file is the other way round: It´s too light for my opinion. Though Xe847 tints everything yellow, I prefer it over PhotoPerfect´s result, which has acceptable colors but is too high in contrast and too dark in the shadows. Here are the results, ordered from best to worst:

Image Editor:

DxO:

FixFoto:

Intellihance Pro:

Xe847:

PhotoPerfect:

And here´s the updated charts after running 2 tests:

1. Image Editor: 12
2. FixFoto: 11
3. PhotoPerfect: 5
4. Intellihance Pro: 6
5. Xe847 ProPlus Plug-in: 8
6. DxO Optics Pro: 14

Back to Part 1, Sunlight?
Proceed to Part 3, Indoor/Mixed light?