I upgraded to a Canon 7D body from my trusty old 350D last month. One of my main reasons for the upgrade was to finally be able to take decent high ISO pictures. High ISO is somewhat relative in this case as I found ISO 400 to be about the highest I could stand with the 350D. Anything beyond that resulted in what I considered an unusable amount of noise.
The 7D has not disappointed here. I'm able to go up to ISO 3200 and get great looking pictures. Since I pretty much shoot in available light (I don't seem to have the patience or skill for great flash photography) this is a huge win for me.
I knew going into this that Mac OS X did not have RAW support for the 7D, so I setup the camera to save RAW and JPEG simultaneously. That way I would have usable images immediately, and when 7D support was added I could go back and add the RAW files to Aperture.
Somewhere along the way, I decided that the ~30MB RAW files were piling up a bit quickly and I really didn't need 18MP worth of data, so I dropped the 7D down to the ~10MP medium RAW setting. Seemed like a good ideaas I was still getting images with 2 MP larger than the old 350D and it got the file sizes down to a more manageable ~16MB.
So, when Apple released Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update 2.7 yesterday I was pretty excited. However, that excitement was quickly replaced with some head scratching.
The first thing I discovered was that the update doesn't support the medium or small size RAW formats, just the large. Some searching in the Aperture support forums confirms this is the case, and apparently has been the case for other Canon models as well. This is bad as that means I have a pile of images the OS and Aperture still can't read.
The next thing I discovered is that the update has noise problems in high ISO images compared to the JPEGs I had been viewing. I've since downloaded the demo of Lightroom 2.6 and tried it on the same images. It does a much better job of noise reduction than Aperture, but still not as good as the JPEGs coming straight out of the camera.
Here is an example of what I'm talking about. All are 100% crops of an ISO 3200 image.
Screen capture from Lightroom
Screen capture from Aperture
The JPEG from the camera, at least in my opinion, is the best. While the detail level is lower than the others (obvious tradeoff for noise reduction), the image looks decent and the noise doesn't standout.
Lightroom looks like 100 grit sandpaper.
I'm not sure how to describe the Aperture image, other than really noisy.
And this leads to my dilemma. There is no clear winner here for me. I can illustrate with with a really crappy table.
| Pro | Con | |
| Aperture | Runs quite well on my 24" iMac. Contains thousands of keyworded and adjusted pictures. | Will not read smaller RAW files. Noisiest images of all three options. |
| Lightroom | Reads smaller RAW files. Lower noise than Aperture. | Runs really slow on the iMac. Costs $300. Would need to migrate existing images and keywords. Still has more noise than I would like. |
| Canon JPEG | Images look great. Files are small. | No headroom in images for shadow or highlight recovery, white balance adjustments, etc. |
For the moment, I'm tempted to stick with Aperture and just shoot JPEG but that feels so very very wrong.
I could shoot large RAW + JPEG and archive off the RAW files (not load them into Aperture). For lower ISO images, having the RAW might be handy for adjustments in Aperture. Not so much for higher ISO stuff. But extra work usually means it won't get done.
Has anyone else run into a problem like this? Am I just being nitpicky and need some quiet time in the corner? I know it's all too easy to geek-out over image details and lose sight of the larger picture...
