We proceed to the next challenge: Indoor photography with few, artificial light and fill-in flash, typical for reportage jobs. The picture was taken during the AO Davos Courses in December 2006. It took a while to get the result shown above, but I think it was worth doing all the photoshopping and fine-tuning as none of the automation-candidates could preserve the mood.
The aspects to consider are: The Powerpoint-presentation should not fade to white, the speaker should not look to yellowish, the audience needs a little light-up and the gentleman´s shirt in the front shall keep blue. That quite a lot of details to handle for my auto-optimization-tools. Surprisingly, Xe847 did the job fairly well. I can remember the other results from this plug-in being a bit dark, but with the mixed-light-situation we are presented with shadows that look quite natural. It´s nice seeing the speaker being brightened enough to squeeze a little of that yellow out of the lights. I judge DxO as second because it does lighten the shadows, but in a very friendly way: It keeps contrast in it. Overall lightness is nice and colors are acceptable. Image Editor is similar, but somehow lights up the crowd significantly more while losing details in the darker shadows (check the far back corner of the lecture hall). The projections also begins to fade. Though the output from Intellihance is way too light, I prefer it over the following as details are preserved. FixFoto has good lights and contrast, but is even darker than Image Editor´s picture. Forget about PhotoPerfect in this case: Full contrast, poor colors, no details at all. Seems like it´s almost darker than the original…
Xe847:
DxO:
Image Editor:
Intellihance:
FixFoto:
PhotoPerfect:
Are you looking for intermediate results? Here´s the topten after 3 laps:
- Image Editor: 16
- FixFoto: 13
- PhotoPerfect: 6
- Intellihance Pro: 9
- Xe847 ProPlus Plug-in: 14
- DxO Optics Pro: 19
Till Erdmenger – Businessfotos | Blog 