Review: Photo Ninja 1.0 is the dark horse in the Raw converter sweepstakes
Photo Ninja, a new Raw-image converter and photo-processing app by PictureCode, makes a very good first impression. Used alone or in conjunction with other popular photo-management and photo-editing tools, it’s a capable program, and serious photographers should take notice.
Photo Ninja can handle JPEGs and TIFFs, but like most Raw converters, it is really designed to make the most of your Raw files. JPEGs are (so to speak) cooked and ready to eat—that is, ready to upload to Flickr or Google+ or to send to a printer. In contrast, Raw files store fresh, uncooked (unprocessed) data straight from the camera’s sensor. Because turning that Raw data into a finished photo is more complex than cooking boeuf bourguignon, different programs convert the same Raw data in different ways.
Making the most of Raw
How well a program’s initial conversion suits your taste is the first question to ask of a photo-processing app. So how well does Photo Ninja do for me? Surprisingly well. Compared with renderings of the same files in other Raw converters such as Adobe Camera Raw (Lightroom) and Aperture, Photo Ninja’s default rendering of my Raw files typically had finer detail and more vivid color. Images that had a wide exposure range (shadowy woods and sunny sky) often opened in Photo Ninja without the blown highlights I’d occasionally see in Lightroom or Aperture. For example, Aperture's initial conversion of the photo at the top of this article (of a mule caravan in the Grand Canyon) left virtually no color or detail in the sky in the upper right corner. I thought I'd simply blown the sky out. The image shown here, however, is Photo Ninja's default conversion — with no tweaks at all. The sky is a nice, realistic blue and you can even see the jet contrails, and yet the exposure of the main part of the picture shows acceptable exposure, good color and rich detail. This is the kind of Raw capture that Photo Ninja does best with.
Sometimes, the Photo Ninja rendering of a shot exhibited finer detail but also less visible noise than the Lightroom rendering; this result is especially impressive, because ordinarily the fix for noise involves blurring, which also hurts detail. In this regard, Photo Ninja’s pedigree really shows. It’s from PictureCode, the same small Austin, Texas, company that produced Noise Ninja, which for years was the choice of many pro photographers for removing digital noise from images.
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