Comparison – The Amazing Sky

January 1, 2023March 25, 2023

Testing Raw Developer Software for Astrophotography

I test nine programs for processing raw files for the demands of nightscape astrophotography.

Warning! This is a long and technical blog, but for those interested in picking the best software, I think you’ll find it the most comprehensive test of programs for processing nightscapes. The review is illustrated with 50 high-resolution, downloadable images which will take a while to load. Patience!

As a background, in December 2017 I tested ten contenders vying to be alternatives to Adobe’s suite of software. You can find that earlier survey here on my blog. But 2017 was ages ago in the lifetime of software. How well do the latest versions of those programs compare now for astrophotography? And what new software choices do we have as we head into 2023?

To find out, I compared eight programs, pitting them against what I still consider the standard for image quality when developing raw files, Adobe Camera Raw (the Develop module in Adobe Lightroom is essentially identical). I tested them primarily on sample nightscape images described below.

I tested only programs that are offered for both MacOS and Windows, with identical or nearly identical features for both platforms. However, I tested the MacOS versions.

In addition to Adobe Camera Raw (represented by the Adobe Bridge icon), I tested, in alphabetical order, and from left to right in the icons above:

ACDSee Photo Studio
Affinity Photo 2 (from Serif)
Capture One 23
Darktable 4
DxO PhotoLab 6
Exposure X7
Luminar Neo (from SkyLum)
ON1 Photo RAW 2023

I tested all the programs strictly for the purpose of processing, or “developing” raw files, using nightscape images as the tests. I also looked at features for preparing and exporting a large batch of images to assemble into time-lapse movies, though the actual movie creation usually requires specialized software.

NOTE: I did not test the programs with telescope images of nebulas or galaxies. The reason — most deep-sky astrophotographers never use a raw developer anyway. Instead, the orthodox workflow is to stack and align undeveloped raw files with specialized “calibration” software such as DeepSkyStacker or PixInsight that outputs 16-bit or 32-bit TIFFs, bypassing any chance to work with the raw files.

TL;DR Conclusions

Here’s a summary of my recommendations, with the evidence for my conclusions presented at length (!) in the sections that follow:

What’s Best for Still Image Nightscapes?

Adobe Camera Raw (or its equivalent in Adobe Lightroom) still produces superb results, lacking only the latest in AI noise reduction, sharpening and special effects. Though, as I’ve discovered, AI processing can ruin astrophotos if not applied carefully.

The Adobe alternatives that provided the best raw image quality in my test nightscapes were Capture One and DxO PhotoLab.

ACDSee Photo Studio, Exposure X7,and Luminar Neo produced good results, but all had flaws.

ON1 Photo RAW had its flaws as well, but can serve as a single-program replacement for both Lightroom and Photoshop.

Affinity Photo works well as a Photoshop replacement, and at a low one-time cost. But it is a poor choice for developing raw images.

If you are adamant about avoiding subscription software, then a combination of DxO PhotoLab and Affinity Photo can work well, providing great image quality, and serving to replace both Lightroom and Photoshop.

I cannot recommend Darktable, despite its zero price. I struggled to use its complex and overly technical interface, only to get poor results. It also kept crashing, despite me using the new ARM version on my M1 MacBook Pro. It was worth what I paid for it.

At the end of my blog, I explain the reasons why I did not include other programs in the test, to answer the inevitable “But what about …!?” questions.

What’s Best for Basic Time-Lapses?

For simple time-lapse processing, where the same settings can be applied to all the images in a sequence, all the programs except Affinity Photo, can copy and paste settings from one key image to all the others in a set, then export them out as JPGs for movie assembly.

However, for the best image quality and speed, I feel the best choices are:

Adobe, either Lightroom or the combination of Camera Raw/Bridge
Capture One 23
DxO PhotoLab 6

While ON1 Photo RAW can assemble movies directly from developed raw files, I found Capture One or DxO PhotoLab can do a better job processing the raw files. And ON1’s time-lapse function is limited, so in my opinion it is not a major selling point of ON1 for any serious time-lapse work.
Luminar Neo was so slow at Copy & Paste and Batch Export it was essentially unusable.

What’s Best for Advanced Time-Lapses?

None of the non-Adobe programs will work with the third-party software LRTimelapse (www.lrtimelapse.com). It is an essential tool for advanced time-lapse processing.

While ON1 offers time-lapse movie assembly, it cannot do what LRTimelapse does — gradually shift processing settings over a sequence based on keyframes to accommodate changing lighting, and to micro-adjust exposure levels based on actual image brightness to smooth out the bane of time-lapse shooters — image flickering.

LRTimelapse works only with Lightroom or ACR/Bridge. If serious and professional time-lapse shooting is your goal, none of the Adobe contenders will do the job. Period. Subscribe to Adobe software. And buy LRTimelapse.

Avoiding Adobe?

My testing demonstrated to me that for nightscape photography, Adobe software remains a prime choice, for its image quality and ease of use. However, the reasons to go with any program other than Adobe are:

For equal or even better image quality, or for features not offered by Adobe.
But mostly to avoid Adobe’s subscription model of monthly or annual payments.

Capture One pricing as of early 2023, in Canadian funds.

All the non-Adobe alternatives can be purchased as a “perpetual license” for a one-time fee, though often with significant annual upgrade costs for each year’s major new release. However, you needn’t purchase the upgrade; your old version will continue to run. Below, I provide purchase prices in U.S. funds, but most companies have frequent sales and discount offers.

While all of Adobe’s competitors will proclaim one-time pricing, several also offer their software via annual subscriptions, with additional perks and bonuses, such as file syncing to mobile apps, or better long-term or package pricing, to entice you to subscribe.

Keep in mind that whatever program you use, its catalog and/or sidecar files where your raw image settings are stored will always be proprietary to that program. ON1 and Affinity also each save files in their own proprietary format. Switch to any other software in the future and your edits will likely not be readable by that new software.

Raw Editing vs. Layer-Based Editing

As I mentioned, I tested all the programs strictly for their ability to process, or “develop,” raw image files for nightscapes. (Raw files are likened to being digital negatives that we “develop.”)

For some nightscape still images, raw developing might be all that’s needed, especially as software companies add more advanced “AI” (artificial intelligence) technology to their raw developers for precise selection, masking, and special effects.

In the case of time-lapse sequences made of hundreds of raw frames, raw developing is the only processing that is practical. What we need for time-lapses is to:

Develop a single key raw file to look great, then …
Copy all its settings to the hundreds of other raw files in the time-lapse set, then …
Export that folder of raw images to “intermediate JPGs” for assembly into a movie, usually with a specialized assembly program.

The programs that offer layer-based editing: Adobe Photoshop, ON1 Photo RAW, and Serif Affinity Photo

However, for most still-image astrophotography, including nightscapes, we often stack and/or blend multiple images to create the final scene, for several reasons:

To stack multiple images with a Mean or Median stack mode to smooth noise.
To layer dozens of images with a Lighten blend mode to create star trails.
To layer and blend images via masking to combine the different exposures often needed to record the ground and sky each at their best.
Or often as not, a combination of all of the above!

All those methods require a layer-based program. Adobe Photoshop is the most popular choice.

Of the programs tested here, only two also offer the ability to layer multiple images for stacks, blends and composites. They are:

Affinity Photo 2
ON1 Photo RAW 2023

I did not test these two programs to compare their image layering and masking abilities vs. Photoshop, as important as those functions might be.

Fans of Skylum’s Luminar Neo will point out that it also supports image layers. In theory. In the version I tested (v1.6.2) bugs made it impossible to load files into layers properly — the layer stack became confused and failed to display the stack’s contents. I could not tell what it was stacking! Skylum is notorious for its buggy releases.

Those determined not to use Adobe software should be aware that, apart from Affinity Photo and ON1 Photo RAW, all the other programs tested here are not replacements for Adobe Photoshop, nor are they advertised as such. They are just raw developers, and so can serve only to replace Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw/Adobe Bridge.

The Challenge

This is the main image I threw at all nine programs, a single 2-minute exposure taken at Lake Louise, Alberta in October 2022. The lens was the Canon RF15-35mm at f/2.8 on a Canon R5 camera at ISO 800.

Above is the raw image as it came out of camera, with the default Adobe Color camera profile applied, but no other adjustments. The length of exposure on a static tripod meant the stars trailed. The image has:

A sky that needs color correcting and contrast enhancement.
Dark shadows in the foreground and distance that need recovery.
Bright foreground areas that need suppressing, where lights from the Chateau Lake Louise hotel illuminate the mountainsides and water.
Lens flares and lights from night hikers that need retouching out.

It is an iconic scene, but when shot at night, it’s a challenging one to process.

The untracked image developed in Adobe Camera Raw

Above is the image after development in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), using sliders under its Basic, Optics, Detail, Curve, Color Mixer, and Calibration tabs, and applying the Adobe Landscape camera profile. Plus I added retouching, and local adjustments with ACR’s masks to affect just the sky and parts of the ground individually. This is the result I think looks best, and is the look I tried to get all other programs to match or beat. You might prefer a different look or style.

In addition, I tried all programs on another two-minute exposure of the scene (shown above) but taken on a star tracker to produce untrailed, pinpoint stars, but a blurred ground. It served to test how well each program’s noise reduction and sharpening dealt with stars.

The final layered and blended image in Adobe Photoshop

I shot that tracked version to blend with the untracked version to produce the very final image above, created from the Camera Raw edits. That blending of sky and ground images (with each component a stack of several images) was done in Photoshop. However, Affinity Photo or ON1 Photo RAW could have done the required layering and masking. I show a version done with Affinity at the end of the blog.

The Competitors

In a statement I read some time ago, DxO stated that Adobe products enjoy a 90% share of the image processing market, leaving all the competitors to battle over the remaining 10%. I’m not sure how accurate that is today, especially as many photographers will use more than one program.

However, I think it is fair to say Adobe’s offerings are the programs all competitors are out to beat.

NOTE: Click/tap on any of the images to bring them up full screen as high-res JPGs so you can inspect them more closely.

The Established Standard

Adobe Camera Raw (included with Photoshop, Adobe Bridge and Lightroom)

Cost: $10 a month, or $120 a year by subscription for 20 Gb of cloud storage (all prices in U.S. $)

Website: https://www.adobe.com

Version tested: 15.1

Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) is the raw development utility that comes with Photoshop and Adobe Bridge, Adobe’s image browsing application. Camera Raw is equivalent to the Develop module in Lightroom, Adobe’s cataloguing and asset management software. Camera Raw and Lightroom have identical processing functions and can produce identical results, but I tested ACR. I use it in conjunction with Adobe Bridge as an image browser. Bridge can then send multiple developed images into Photoshop as layers for stacking. All programs are included in Adobe’s Photo subscription plan.

The Contenders (in Alphabetical Order)

Here are the eight programs I tested, comparing them to Adobe Camera Raw. All but Skylum’s Luminar Neo offer free trial copies.

ACDSee Photo Studio

Cost: $100 to $150, depending on version. $50 on up for annual major upgrades. By subscription from $70 a year.

Website: http://www.acdsystems.com

Version tested: 9.1

I tested Photo Studio for Mac v9. Windows users have a choice of Photo Studio Professional or Photo Studio Ultimate. All three versions offer a suite of raw development tools, in addition to cataloging functions. However, the Ultimate version (Windows only) also offers layer-based editing, making it similar to Photoshop. ACDSee assured me that Photo Studio for Mac resembles the Windows Professional version, at least for basic raw editing and image management. However, Photo Studio Professional for Windows also has HDR and Panorama merging, which the Mac version does not.

Affinity Photo 2

Cost: $70. Upgrades are free except for rare whole-number updates (in seven years there’s been only one of those!). No subscription plan is offered.

Website: https://affinity.serif.com

Version tested: 2.0.3

Apart from the free Darktable, this is the lowest-cost raw developer on offer here. But Affinity’s strength is as a layer-based editor to compete with Photoshop. As such, Affinity Photo has some impressive features, such as the unique ability to calibrate and align deep-sky images, its stack modes (great for star trails and noise smoothing) which only Photoshop also has, and its non-destructive adjustment layers, filters and masks. Affinity Photo is the most Photoshop-like of all the programs here. However, it alone of the group lacks any image browser or cataloging function, so this is not a Lightroom replacement.

Capture One 23 Pro

Cost: $299. 33% off (about $200) for annual major upgrades. By subscription for $180 a year.

Website: https://www.captureone.com/en

Version tested: 16.0.1.17

Capture One started life as a program for tethered capture shooting in fashion studios. It has evolved into a very powerful raw developer and image management program. While Capture One advertises that it now offers “layers,” these are only for applying local adjustments to masked areas of a single underlying image. While they work well, you cannot layer different images. So Capture One cannot be used like Photoshop, to stack and composite images. It is a Lightroom replacement only, but a very good one. However, it is the most costly to buy, upgrade each year, or subscribe to, which appears to be the sales model Capture One is moving toward, following Adobe.

Darktable

Cost: Free, open source.

Website: https://www.darktable.org

Version tested: 4.2.0

In contrast to Capture One, you cannot argue with Darktable’s price! For a free, open-source program, Darktable is surprisingly full-featured, while being fairly well supported and updated. As with most free cross-platform programs, Darktable uses an unconventional and complex user interface lacking any menus. It has two main modules: Lighttable for browsing images, and Darkroom for editing images. Map, Slideshow, Print and Tethering modules clearly signal this program is intended to be a free version of Lightroom. The price you pay, however, is in learning to use its complex interface.

DxO PhotoLab 6 ELITE

Cost: $219. $99 for annual major upgrades. No subscription plan is offered.

Website: https://www.dxo.com

Version tested: 6.1.1

DxO PhotoLab is similar to Capture One in being a very complete and feature-rich raw developer with good image management functions and a well-designed interface. While it has an image browser for culling, keywording and rating images, PhotoLab does not create a catalog as such, so this isn’t a full Lightroom replacement. But it is a superb raw developer, with very good image quality and noise reduction. While PhotoLab is also available in a $140 ESSENTIAL edition, it lacks the DeepPrime noise reduction and ClearView Plus haze reduction, both useful features for astrophotos.

Exposure X7

Cost: $129. $89 for annual major upgrades. No subscription plan is offered.

Website: https://exposure.s o ftware/

Version tested: 7.1.5

Formerly known as Alien Skin Exposure, from the makers of the once-popular utilities Blow Up and Eye Candy, Exposure X7 is a surprisingly powerful raw editor (considering you might not have heard of it!), with all the expected adjustment options, plus a few unique ones such as Bokeh for purposely blurring backgrounds. It enjoys annual major updates, so is kept up to date, though is a little behind the times in lacking any AI-based effects or masking, or even automatic edge detection. Like Capture One, Exposure offers adjustment layers for ease of applying local edits.

Luminar Neo

Cost: $149. $39 to $59 for individual Extensions. $179 for Extensions pack. By subscription for $149 a year which includes Neo and all Extensions. Frequent discounts and changing bundles make the pricing confusing and unpredictable.

Website: https://skylum.com/luminar

Version tested: 1.6.2

By contrast to Exposure X7, Luminar Neo from Skylum is all about AI. Indeed, its predecessor was called Luminar AI. Introduced in 2022, Neo supplanted Luminar AI, whose image catalog could not be read by Neo, much to the consternation of users. Luminar AI is now gone. All of Skylum’s effort now goes into Neo. It offers the expected raw editing adjustments, along with many powerful one-click AI effects and tools, some offered as extra-cost extensions in a controversial à la carte sales philosophy. Neo’s cataloging ability is basic and unsuitable for image management.

ON1 Photo RAW 2023

Cost: $99. $60 for annual major upgrades. $70 for individual plug-ins, each with paid annual updates. By subscription for $90 a year which includes all plug-ins and updates.

Website: https://www.on1.com

Version tested: 17.0.2

Of all the contenders tested, this is the only program that can truly replace both Lightroom and Photoshop, in that ON1 Photo RAW has cataloging, raw developing, and image layering and masking abilities. In recent years ON1 has introduced AI functions for selection, noise reduction, and sharpening. Some of these are also available as individual plug-ins for Lightroom and Photoshop at an additional cost. While the main program and plug-ins can be purchased as perpetual licences, the total cost makes an annual subscription the cheapest way to get and maintain the full ON1 suite. Like Capture One, they are moving customers to be subscribers.

Feature Focus

I have assumed a workflow that starts with raw image files, not JPGs, for high-quality results. And I have assumed the goal of making that raw image look as good as possible at the raw stage, an important step in the workflow, as it is the only time we have access to the full dynamic range of the 14-bit raw data that comes from the camera.

I judged each program based on several features I consider key to great nightscapes and time-lapses:

Browser/Cataloging Functions —Because we often deal with lots of images from an astrophoto shoot, the program should allow us to sort, rate, and cull images before proceeding with developing the best of the set for later stacking, and to easily compare the results.

Lens Corrections —Does the program apply automatic lens corrections for distortion and vignetting? How extensive is its lens database? Or are manual adjustments required?

Noise Reduction —We shoot at high ISOs, so good noise reduction is essential for removing digital noise without sacrificing details such as pixel-level stars, or adding AI artifacts.

Shadow Recovery —While good highlight recovery can be important (and a prime reason for shooting and processing raw images), in nightscapes good shadow recovery is even more crucial. The starlit ground is dark, but rich in detail. We want to recover that shadow detail, without affecting other tonal ranges or introducing noise.

Local Adjustments and Masking —Good masking tools allow us to do more at the raw stage while we have access to the full range of image data. But how precise can the masks be? How easy is it to apply different settings to the ground and sky, the most common need for local adjustments with nightscapes.

Overall Finished Image Quality —Tools such as Dehaze and Clarity can work wonders at boosting contrast in the sky. Good color adjustments from HSL sliders can help fine-tune the overall color balance. How good did the final image look? — an admittedly subjective judgement.

Copy & Paste Settings —A program should not only develop one image well, but also then be able to transfer all of that key image’s settings to several other images taken for noise stacking, or to what could be hundreds of images shot for a time-lapse movie or star trail scene.

Batch Export —For stacking images for star trails, or for creating panoramas in advanced stitching programs such as PTGui, or when assembling time-lapse movies, the program should allow a “batch export” of selected images to TIFFs or JPGs for use elsewhere.

Advanced Features —Does the program support panorama stitching and HDR (High Dynamic Range) merging of selected developed raw files? If so, what type of file does it create?

Summary Comparison Table

• = Feature is present; ticks the boxes!

— = Feature is missing

Partial = Feature only partially implemented (e.g. Only has distortion correction but not vignetting correction, or has limited cataloging functions)

I judged other features on an admittedly subjective scale of Poor, Fair, Good, or Excellent, based on my overall impressions of the reliability, options offered, quality, and/or speed of operation.

Feature-by-Feature Details — 1. Browsing and Cataloging

Here, feature by feature, are what I feel are the differences among the programs, comparing them using the key factors I listed above.

All programs, but one, offer a Browse or Library module presenting thumbnails of all the images in a folder or on a drive. (For Adobe Camera Raw that module is Adobe Bridge, included with the Creative Cloud Photo subscription.) From the Browse/Library module you can sort, rate and cull images.

The Catalog screens from six of the programs tested

Luminar Neo’s Catalog function (as of early 2023) allows only flagging images as favorites. It is very crude.

The other programs have more full-featured image management, allowing star rating, color label rating, pick/reject flags, keywording, grouping into collections or projects, and searching.

Capture One and ON1 Photo RAW provide the option of importing images into formal catalogs, just as Adobe Lightroom requires. However, unlike Lightroom, both programs can also work with images just by pointing them to a folder, without any formal import process. Capture One calls this a “session.” Adobe Bridge works that way — it doesn’t produce a catalog.

While not having to import images first is convenient, having a formal catalog allows managing a library even when the original images are off-line on a disconnected hard drive, or for syncing to a mobile app. If that’s important, then consider Capture One, ON1 Photo RAW, or Adobe Lightroom. They each have mobile apps.

Adobe Lightroom (but not Bridge) is also able to connect directly to what it calls “Publish Services” — Flickr, PhotoShelter, and SmugMug for example, using plug-ins offered by those services. I use that feature almost daily. ACDSee offers that feature only in its Windows versions of Photo Studio. As best I could tell, all other programs lacked anything equivalent.

Serif Affinity Photo is the lone exception lacking any form of image browser or asset management. It’s hard to fathom why in late 2022, with their major update to Version 2 of their software suite, Serif did not introduce a digital asset management program to link their otherwise excellent Photo, Designer and Publisher programs. This is a serious limitation of Serif’s Affinity creative suite, which is clearly aimed at competing one-on-one with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, yet Serif has no equivalent of Adobe Bridge for asset management.

WINNERS: Capture One and ON1 Photo RAW, for the most flexibility in informal browsing vs. formal cataloguing. Adobe Lightroom for its Publish Services.

LOSER: Affinity Photo for lacking any image management or catalog.

Feature-by-Feature Details — 2. Lens Corrections

The wide-angle lenses we typically use in nightscape and time-lapse imaging suffer from vignetting and lens distortions. Ideally, software should automatically detect the camera and lens used and apply accurate corrections based on its equipment database.

The Lens Corrections panels from all nine programs.

Of the nine programs tested, only four — Adobe Camera Raw, Darktable, DxO PhotoLab, and ON1 Photo Raw — automatically applied both distortion and vignetting corrections for the Canon RF15-35mm lens I used for the test images. DxO is particularly good at applying corrections, drawing upon the company’s vast repository of camera and lens data. If your local copy of PhotoLab is missing a camera-lens combination, what it calls a “module,” DxO allows you to download it or request it.

Capture One and Exposure X7 both detected the lens used and applied distortion correction, but did nothing to adjust vignetting. I had to apply vignetting correction, a more important adjustment, manually by eye.

ACDSee and Luminar have no Auto Lens Corrections at all; distortion and vignetting both have to be dialed in manually.

Affinity Photo lacked any automatic correction data for the Canon RF15-35mm lens in question, despite the lens being introduced in 2019. I selected the similar Canon EF16-35mm lens instead, as I show above circled in blue. Affinity gets marks off for having an outdated and incomplete lens database.

WINNERS: Adobe, Darktable, DxO PhotoLab, and ON1 Photo RAW, for full Auto Lens Corrections.

LOSERS: ACDSee and Luminar, for lacking Auto Lens Corrections.

Feature-by-Feature Details — 3. Noise Reduction and Sharpening

Absolutely essential to astrophotography is effective noise reduction, of both grainy “luminance” noise, as well as colorful speckles and splotches from “chrominance” noise. Programs should smooth noise without eliminating stars, removing star colors, or adding odd structures and artifacts.

Conversely, programs should offer a controllable level of sharpening, without introducing dark halos around stars, a sure sign of over-zealous sharpening.

Closeups of the tracked image comparing noise reduction and star image quality in all 9 programs. Tap or click to download a high-res version for closer inspection to see the pixel-level differences.

I tested noise reduction using the tracked version of my test images, as the pinpoint stars from the 45-megapixel Canon R5 will reveal any star elimination or discoloration.

Adobe Camera Raw’s aging noise reduction routine stood up very well against the new AI competitors. It smoothed noise acceptably, while retaining star colors and Milky Way structures. But turn it up too high, as might be needed for very high ISO shots, and it begins to blur or wipe out stars. AI noise reduction promises to solve this.

AI-Based Noise Reduction:

DxO PhotoLab’s Prime and DeepPrime AI-based options can also do a good job. But … I find DeepPrime (shown above) and the newer DeepPrimeXD (shown below) can introduce wormy looking artifacts to starfields. The older Prime method might be a better choice. However, the annoyance with DxO PhotoLab is that it is not possible to preview any of its Prime noise reduction results full-screen, only in a tiny preview window, making the best settings a bit of a guess, requiring exporting the image to see the actual results.

ON1 Photo RAW’s NoNoise AI can also do a good job, but has to be backed off a lot from the automatic settings its AI technology applies. Even so, I found it still left large-scale color blotches, a pixel-level mosaic pattern, and worst of all, dark halos around stars, despite me applying no sharpening at all to the image. ON1 continues to over-sharpen under the hood. I criticized it for star halos in my 2017 survey — the 2023 version behaves better, but still leaves stars looking ugly.

The other AI program, Luminar Neo with its Noiseless AI extension (an extra-cost option) did a poor job, adding strange artifacts to the background sky and colored halos around stars.

Comparing DxO’s three Prime noise reduction options on the untracked image. DeepPrimeXD is sharper!

Comparing DxO’s three Prime noise reduction methods on the tracked image. DeepPrimeXD is riddled with artifacts.

So beware of AI. As I show above with DxO, because they are not trained on starfields, AI routines can introduce unwanted effects and false structures. What works wonders on high-ISO wildlife or wedding shots can ruin astrophotos.

For a more complete test of AI programs, such as Topaz DeNoise AI and Noise XTerminator, made specifically for noise reduction, see my review from November 2022, Testing Noise Reduction Programs for Astrophotography.

Non AI-Based Noise Reduction:

Capture One smoothed noise very well, but tended to bloat stars and soften fine detail with its Single Pixel control turned up even to one pixel, as here.

Affinity Photo nicely smoothed noise, but also removed star colors, yet added colored rims to some stars, perhaps from poor de-Bayering. Serif Lab’s raw engine still has its flaws.

ACDSee Photo Studio also added loads of unacceptable halos to stars, and could not reduce noise well without smoothing details.

Darktable has very good noise reduction, including a panel specifically for Astrophoto Denoise. Great! Pity its routines seemed to wipe out star colors and fine structures in the Milky Way.

Exposure X7 smoothed noise well, but also wiped out details and structures, and its sharpening adds dark halos to stars.

That said, it might be possible to eke out better results from all these programs with more careful settings. Backing off sharpening or noise reduction can avoid some of the unwanted side effects I saw, but leave more noise.

Adobe Camera Raw does eliminate most random hot or dead pixels “under the hood.” However, I wish it had an adjustable filter for removing any that still remain (usually from thermal noise) and that can plague the shadows of nightscapes. Single-pixel filters are offered by Capture One, Darktable, DxO, and Exposure X7. Though turning them up too high can ruin image detail.

WINNERS: Adobe and DxO PhotoLab (if the latter is used cautiously)

LOSERS: ACDSee, Affinity, Darktable, Exposure X7, and Luminar Neo for unacceptable loss of detail and star colors, while adding in false structures (Neo)

Feature-by-Feature Details — 4. Shadow Recovery

While all programs have exposure and contrast adjustments, the key to making a Milky Way nightscape look good is being able to boost the shadows in the dark starlit ground, while preventing the sky or other areas of the image from becoming overly bright or washed out.

Comparing Shadow Recovery in two programs (Camera Raw – top – and DxO PhotoLab – middle) that worked quite well, with Darktable (bottom) that did not.

In the three examples above I have applied only white balance and exposure correction, then “lifted” the Shadows. I added some contrast adjustment to Darktable, to help improve it, and Smart Lighting to the DxO image, which was needed here.

Here are my findings, roughly in order of decreasing image quality, but with Adobe first as the one to match or beat.

Adobe Camera Raw has a very good Shadows slider that truly affects just the dark tonal areas and with a slight touch (turning it up to 100 doesn’t wipe out the image). Some other programs’ Shadows adjustments are too aggressive, affect too wide a range of tones, or just add a grey wash over the image, requiring further tweaks to restore contrast.

Capture One did an excellent job on Shadow recovery under its High Dynamic Range set of sliders. The dark landscape brightened without becoming flat or grey. This is a primary contributor to its excellent image quality.

DxO PhotoLab’s Shadows slider affects a wider tonal range than ACR or Capture One, also brightening mid-tones, though it has a Midtones slider to separately adjust those. On its own, the Shadows slider didn’t work as well as in ACR or Capture One. But DxO’s superb feature is its “Smart Lighting,” which can work wonders on a scene with one click. Another unique adjustment is “ClearView Plus,” a form of Dehaze which can snap up contrast, often too aggressively, but it can be backed off in intensity. Those two adjustments alone might be reason enough to use PhotoLab.

ON1 Photo RAW’s Shadows slider affected too wide a range of tonal values, brightening the entire scene and making it look flat. This can be overcome with some tweaks to the Contrast, Blacks and Midtones sliders. It takes more work to make a scene look good.

ACDSee’s Fill Light and Shadows sliders were also much too broad. But its unique LightEQ panel has options for “Standard” and “Advanced” settings which each provide an equalizer interface for making more selective tonal adjustments. It worked well, though the image looked too harsh and contrasty, despite me adding no contrast adjustments, the opposite flaw of other programs.

Luminar Neo’s Shadows slider under its DevelopRAW panel was also broad, washing out contrast, requiring a liberal application of its SuperContrast slider to return the image to a better look. But the final result looked fine.

Exposure X7’s Shadows slider also lowered overall contrast, requiring boosting Contrast and Blacks to return the image to a pleasing tonal balance.

Affinity Photo’s Shadows slider did a far better job in its new v2 (released in late 2022) than in the original Affinity Photo, which was frankly awful. Even so, I found Affinity Photo 2 still tended to produce flat results, hard to compensate for from within the Develop Persona, as its options are so limited.

Darktable’s Shadows slider (which has several sub-sliders) produced a flat result. Despite the numerous variations of other contrast and level adjustments scattered over various panels, I could not get a pleasing result. It will take a true Darktable fan and expert to exact a good image from its bewildering options, if it’s even possible.

WINNERS: Capture One and DxO PhotoLab, plus Adobe still works well

LOSERS: Affinity Photo and Darktable

Feature-by-Feature Details — 5. Local Adjustments and Masking

This is the area where programs have made major improvements in the five years since my last survey of raw developers. Thus I devote a major section to the feature.

With accurate and easy masking it is now easier to apply adjustments to just selected areas of a raw image. We can finish off a raw file to perhaps be publication ready, without having to use a layer-based program like Photoshop to perform those same types of local adjustments. Adobe Camera RAW, Luminar Neo, and ON1 Photo Raw are leaders in this type of advanced AI masking. But other programs have good non-AI methods of masking – and making – local adjustments.

Adobe Camera Raw (and Adobe Lightroom) now has far better masking than in older versions that used the awkward method of applying multiple “pins.” Masks now occupy separate layers, and AI masks can be created in one-click for the sky (and ground by inverting the Sky mask) and for key subjects in the image. Other non-AI masks can be created with brushes (with an Auto Mask option for edge detection) and gradient overlays, and with the option of luminance and color range masks. The AI-created Sky masks proved the most accurate compared to other programs’ AI selections, though they can intrude into the ground at times. But the sky masks do include the stars. In all, Camera Raw (or Lightroom) has the most powerful masking tools of the group, though they can be tricky to master.

ACDSee Photo Studio allows up to eight different brushed-on mask areas, each with its own adjustments, in addition to gradient masks. There is no edge detection as such, though the brushes can be limited to selecting areas of similar brightness and color. The “Magic” brush option didn’t help in selecting just the sky and stars. Local adjustments are possible to only Exposure, Saturation, Fill Light, Contrast, and Clarity. So no local color adjustments are possible. In all, local adjustments are limited.

Affinity Photo has, in its Develop Persona, what it calls Overlays, where for each Overlay, or layer, you can brush on separate sets of adjustments using all the sliders in the Develop Persona. Oddly, there is no option for decreasing the opacity of a brush, only its size and feathering. While there is an Edge Aware option, it did a poor job on the test image detecting the boundary between land and sky, despite the edge being sharply defined. So local adjustments require a lot of manual brushing and erasing to get an accurate mask. The red mask Overlay, useful at times, has to be turned on and off manually. Other programs (ACR and Capture One) have the option of the colored overlay appearing automatically just when you are brushing.

Capture One offers adjustment layers for each mask required. The only “smart” brush is the Magic Brush which affects areas across the entire image with similar luminosity. There isn’t any edge detection option as such, so creating masks for the sky and ground is still largely a manual process requiring careful brushing. Separate layers can be added for healing and retouching. While Capture One’s local adjustments can work well, they require a lot more manual work than do programs equipped with AI-driven selection tools.

DxO PhotoLab allows multiple local adjustments, with the option of an Auto Mask brush that nicely detects edges, though the mask overlay itself (as shown above on the sky) doesn’t accurately show the area being affected. Strange. Masks can also be added with what are called Control Points to affect just areas of similar luminance within a wide circle, often requiring multiple Control Points to create an adjustment across a large region. Masks can also be created with adjustable brushes. Each masked area is then adjusted using a set of equalizer-like mini-controls, rather than in the main panels. In all, it’s a quirky interface, but it can work quite well once you get used to it.

Exposure X7 offers adjustment layers with options to add a gradient, or to draw or brush on an area to make a selection. There is no edge detection, only a color range mask option, so creating a sky or ground mask can require lots of hand painting. I found the preview sluggish, making it a bit of a trial-and-error exercise to make fine adjustments. However, the full range of tone and color adjustments can be applied to any local mask, a plus compared to ACDSee for example.

Luminar was first out with AI masks to automatically select the sky, and various landscape elements it detects. In all it does a good job, making it easy to add local adjustments. There are also gradient tools and normal brushes, but oddly, considering the amount of AI Luminar relies on, there is no edge detection (at least, as of early 2023). So brushing to create a mask requires a lot of finicky painting and erasing to refine the mask edge. The strong point is that masks can be added to any of Luminar’s many filters and adjustment panels, allowing for lots of options for tweaking the appearance of selected areas, such as adding special effects like glows to the sky or landscape. However, most of those filters and effects are added to the image after it is developed, and not to the original raw file.

ON1’s AI Sky mask does not include the stars.

ON1 Photo RAW has always offered good local adjustments, with each occupying its own layer. Photo RAW 2023 added its new “Super Select” AI tools to compete with Adobe. But they are problematic. The select Sky AI masking fails to include stars, leaving a sky mask filled with black holes, requiring lots of hand painting to eliminate. You might as well have created the mask by hand to begin with. Plus in the test image, selecting “Mountain” to create a ground mask just locked up the program, requiring a Force Quit to exit it. However, ON1’s conventional masks and adjustments work well, with a wide choice of brush options. The Perfect Brush detects areas of similar color, not edges per se.

WINNERS: Adobe and Luminar for accurate AI masks

LOSER: Darktable— it has no Local Adjustments at all

Feature-by-Feature Details — 6. Overall Finished Image Quality

I provide each of the finished images for the untracked star trail example below, under Program-by-Program Results. But here’s a summary, in what I admit is a subjective call. One program would excel in one area, but be deficient in another. But who produced the best looking end result?

Overall, I think Capture One came closest to matching or exceeding Adobe Camera Raw for image quality. Its main drawback is the difficulty in creating precise local adjustment masks.

DxO PhotoLab also produced a fine result, but still looking a little flat compared to ACR and Capture One. But it does have good AI noise reduction.

In the middle of the ranking are the group of ACDSee Photo Studio, Exposure X7, and ON1 Photo RAW. Their results look acceptable, but closer examination reveals the flaws such as haloed stars and loss of fine detail. So they rank from Fair to Good, depending on how much you pixel peep!

Luminar Neo did a good job, though achieving those results required going beyond what its DevelopRAW panel can do, to apply Neo’s other filters and effects. So in Neo’s case, I did more to the image than what was possible with just raw edits. But with Luminar, the distinction between raw developer and layer-based editor is fuzzy indeed. It operates quite differently than other programs tested here, perhaps refreshingly so.

For example, with the more conventionally structured workflow of Affinity Photo, I could have exacted better results from it had I taken the developed raw image into its Photo Persona to apply more adjustments farther down the workflow. The same might be said of ON1 Photo RAW.

But the point of this review was to test how well programs could do just at the raw-image stage. Due to the unique way it operates, I’ll admit Luminar Neo did get the advantage in this raw developer test. Though it failed on several key points.

WINNERS: Adobe and Capture One, with DxO a respectable second

LOSER: Darktable— it was just plain poor

Feature-by-Feature Details — 7. Copy & Paste Settings

Getting one image looking great is just the first step. Even when shooting nightscape stills we often take several images to stack later.

As such, we want to be able to process just one image, then copy and paste its settings to all the others in one fell swoop. And then we need to be able to inspect those images in thumbnails to be sure they all look good, as some might need individual tweaking.

While it’s a useful feature for images destined for a still-image composite, Copy & Paste Settings is an absolutely essential feature for processing a set for a time-lapse movie or a star trail stack.

The Copy and Paste Settings panels from the 8 programs that offer this feature.

I tested the programs on the set of 360 time-lapse frames of the Perseid meteor shower used next for the Batch Export test.

Adobe Bridge makes it easy to copy and paste Camera Raw settings to identically process all the files in a folder. Lightroom has a similar function. Adobe also has adaptive masks, where a sky mask created for one image will adapt to all others, even if the framing or composition changes, as it would in a motion-control time-lapse sequence or panorama set. Applying settings to several hundred images is fairly quick, though Bridge can be slow at rendering the resulting thumbnails.

ON1 Photo RAW can also copy and paste AI masks adaptively, so a Sky mask created for one image will adapt to match another image, even if the framing is different. However, applying all the settings to a large number of images and rendering the new previews proved achingly slow. And it’s a pity it doesn’t create a better sky mask to begin with.

Capture One has a single Copy and Apply Adjustments command where you develop one image, select it plus all the other undeveloped images in the set to sync settings from the processed image to all the others. But the adjustment layers and their masks copy identically; there is no adaptive masking because there are no AI-generated masks. However, applying new settings to hundreds of images and rendering their thumbnails is very fast, better than other programs.

DxO PhotoLab’s Control Point masks and local adjustments also copy identically. Copying adjustments from one image to the rest in the set of 360 test images was also very fast.

ACDSee Photo Studio and Exposure X7 also allow copying and pasting all or selected settings, including local adjustment masks. ACDSee was slow, but Exposure X7 was quite quick to apply settings to a large batch of images, such as the 360 test images.

Darktable’s function is under the History Stack panel where you can copy and paste all or selected settings, but all are global — there are no local adjustments or masks.

Luminar Neo allows only copying and pasting of all settings, not a selected set. When testing it on the set of 360 time-lapse frames, Neo proved unworkably slow, taking as much as an hour to apply settings and render the resulting thumbnails in its Catalog view, during which time my M1 MacBook Pro warned the application was running out of memory, taking up 110 Gb! I had to Force Quit it.

Affinity Photo is capable of editing only one image at a time. There is no easy or obvious way to copy the Develop Persona settings from one raw image, open another, then paste in those settings. You can only save Presets for each Develop Persona panel, making transferring settings from one image to even just one other image a tedious process.

Affinity Photo with several raw images stacked and identically processed with the method below.

Affinity Workaround

But … there is a non-obvious and unintuitive method in Affinity which works for stacking and processing a few raw files for a blend:

Process one raw image and then click Develop so it moves into the Photo Persona, as a “RAW Layer (Embedded),” a new feature in Affinity Photo 2.
Find the other raw image files (they won’t have any settings applied) and simply drag them onto the Photo Persona screen.
Use the Move tool to align the resulting new layers with the original image.
Select all the image layers (but only the first will have any settings applied) and hit the Develop Persona button.
Then hit the Develop button — this will apply the settings from the first image to all the others in the layer stack. It’s the best Affinity can do for a “copy and paste” function.
Change the blend mode or add masks to each layer to create a composite or star trail stack.
Each layer can be re-opened in the Develop Persona if needed to adjust its settings.
It’s all a bit of a kludge, but it does work.

WINNERS: Capture One for blazing speed; Adobe and ON1 for adaptive masks

LOSER: Affinity Photo, for lacking this feature entirely, except for a method that is not at all obvious and limited in its use.

Feature-by-Feature Details — 8. Batch Export

Once you develop a folder of raw images with “Copy & Paste,” you now have to export them with all those settings “baked into” the exported files.

This step creates an intermediate set of TIFFs or JPGs to either assemble into a movie with programs such as TimeLapse DeFlicker, or to stack into a star trail composite using software such as StarStaX.

The Batch Export panels from all 9 programs.

To test the Batch Export function, I used each program to export the same set of 360 developed raw files taken with a 20-megapixel Canon R6, shot for a meteor shower time-lapse, exporting them into full-resolution, low-compression JPGs.

While all programs can do the task, some are much better than others.

Adobe Bridge has a configurable Export panel (though it can be buggy at times), as does Lightroom. Its speed is good, but is beaten by several of the competitors.

Even Affinity Photo can do a batch export, done through its “New Batch Job” function. As with its other image selection operations, Affinity depends on your operating system’s Open dialog box to pick images. Exporting worked well, though without being able to develop a batch of raw files, I’m not sure why you would have cause to use this batch function to export them. I had to test it with undeveloped raws. Oddly, Affinity’s exported JPGs (at 5496 x 3664 pixels) were slightly larger than the size of the original raws (which were 5472 x 3648 pixels). No other program did this.

Most programs allow saving combinations of Export settings as frequently used presets. An exception is Exposure X7 where separate presets have to be saved and loaded for each option in its Export panel, awkward. And Luminar Neo’s batch export is basic, with no option for saving Export presets at all.

In the export of the 360 test images, each program took:

Adobe Bridge 15 minutes (after 3 attempts to get it to actually work!)
ACDSee Photo Studio 33 minutes
Affinity Photo 2 32 minutes
Capture One 23 6 minutes
Darktable 4 16 minutes
DxO PhotoLab 6 8 minutes
Exposure X7 5 minutes 30 seconds
Luminar Neo 8.5 hours (!)
ON1 Photo RAW 2023 1.4 hours

This was on my M1 Max MacBook Pro. Your mileage will vary! The clear winners in the export race were Exposure X7, Capture One, and DxO. ON1 was way behind the pack. Luminar was impossibly slow. It is not a program for working with lots of images.

ON1’s Time-Lapse Function

Unique among these programs, ON1 Photo RAW provides a Time-Lapse function that allows directly exporting developed raw files to a final movie, without the need to export an intermediate JPG set. That sounds like a great time saver. Only Adobe After Effects can do the same.

However … ON1’s options are limited: up to a maximum DCI 4K size, in H264 or Apple ProRes codecs, and with a choice of just three frame rates: 24, 25, or 30 frames per second. A dedicated assembly program such as TimeLapse DeFlicker can do a much better job, and faster, with more options such as frame blending, and up to 8K movie sizes.

And oddly, ON1’s Time-Lapse panel provides no option for where to save the movie or what to name it — it defaults to saving the movie to the original folder with the images, and with the name of one of the images. I had to search for it to locate it.

WINNERS: Exposure X7 and Capture One for sheer speed

LOSER: Luminar Neo for being unusably slow

Feature-by-Feature Details — 9. Advanced Features

Here I’ve noted what programs offer what features, but I tested only the panorama stitching function. For a panorama test I used a set of seven images shot with the Canon R5 and RF15-35mm lens at Peyto Lake, Banff.

The Panorama options from 4 programs. ON1 (lower left) failed to stitch 2 of the 7 segments).

Adobe Camera Raw (and Lightroom) offers HDR Merge and Panorama stitching plus, uniquely, the ability to merge multi-exposure HDR panoramas. But it has no Focus Stack option (that’s in Photoshop). For panoramas, ACR offers a choice of projection geometries, and the very excellent Boundary Warp function for filling in blank areas, as well as content-aware Fill Edges. The result is a raw DNG file.

Capture One has HDR Merge and Panorama stitching, but no Focus Stack option. Like ACR, Capture One’s panorama mode offers a choice of projection geometries and results in a raw DNG file for further editing at the raw level. It worked well on the test set, though lacks anything equivalent to ACR’s content-aware Fill Edges and Boundary Warp options.

ON1 Photo RAW offers HDR Merge, Focus Stack, and Panorama stitching of raw files. Using the same seven images that ACR and Capture One succeeded with, ON1 failed to stitch two of the segments, leaving a partial pano. It does offer a limited choice of projection methods and, like ACR, has the option to warp the image to fill blank areas. It creates a raw DNG file.

Affinity Photo also offers HDR Merge, Focus Stack, and Panorama stitching, all from raw files. However, the panorama function is quite basic, with no options for projection geometry or content-aware fill. But it did a good job blending all segments of the test set seamlessly. The result is a raw file that can be further processed in the Develop Persona.

ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac lacks any HDR, Focus Stack, or Panorama stitching. Those functions are available in the Windows versions (Pro and Ultimate), but I did not test them.

Luminar Neo offers HDR Merge and Focus Stack through two extra-cost extensions. As of this writing it does not offer Panorama stitching, but more extensions (yet to be identified!) will be released in 2023.

Darktable offers just HDR Merge, but no Focus Stack or Panorama functions.

DxO PhotoLab 6 lacks any HDR, Focus Stack or Panorama functions. Ditto for Exposure X7. Those are serious deficiencies, as we have a need for all those functions when processing nightscapes. You would have to develop the raw files in DxO or Exposure, then export TIFFs to merge or stitch them using another program such as Affinity Photo.

WINNERS: Adobe and Capture One

LOSER: DxO for missing key functions expected in a premium “Adobe killer”

Program-by-Program Summary

I could end the review here, but I feel it’s important to present the evidence, in the form of the final images, as best I could process them with each of the programs. I rate their overall image quality and performance on a subjective scale of Poor / Fair / Good / Excellent, with additional remarks about the Pros and Cons of each program, as I see them.

Adobe Camera Raw (also applies to Adobe Lightroom)

IMAGE QUALITY: Excellent

PROS: ACR has excellent selective shadow recovery and good noise reduction which, while not up to the level of new AI methods, doesn’t introduce any weird AI artifacts. Its panels and sliders are fairly easy to use, with a clean user interface. Its new AI masking and local adjustments are superb, though take some practice to master.

CONS: It is available only by monthly or annual subscription, and lacks the more advanced AI noise reduction, sharpening, and one-click special effects of some competitors. Using the Adobe suite requires moving between different Adobe programs to perform all functions. Adobe Bridge, a central program in my workflow, tends to be neglected by Adobe, and suffers from bugs and deficiencies that go uncorrected.

ACDSee Photo Studio (for Mac)

IMAGE QUALITY: Fair

PROS: Photo Studio in its various versions offers good image management functions, making it suitable as a non-subscription Lightroom alternative. It offers an advanced array of tonal and color adjustments in an easy-to-use interface.

CONS: It produced badly haloed stars and had poor noise reduction. Its local adjustments are limited and lag behind the competition with no AI functions. It has no panorama stitching or HDR merging functions in the Mac version — the Windows versions get much more love and attention from ACDSee.

Affinity Photo 2

IMAGE QUALITY: Fair (for its Develop Persona) / Good to Excellent (as a Photoshop replacement)

PROS: Affinity Photo is certainly the best alternative to Photoshop for anyone looking to avoid Adobe. It is an excellent layer-based program (far better than GIMP) with unique features for astrophotographers such as stacking and gradient removal. With v2, it is now possible to transfer a raw file from the Develop Persona to the Photo Persona non-destructively, allowing re-opening the raw file for re-editing, similar to Adobe’s Camera Raw Smart Objects.

CONS: Affinity Photo’s Develop Persona for raw files is basic, with limited adjustments and producing average results at best. Transferring settings from one raw file to others is difficult, if not impossible. Affinity Photo is designed for editing single images only.

Capture One 23

IMAGE QUALITY: Excellent

PROS: Capture One has excellent shadow recovery and color adjustment controls. Local adjustments are easy to add and edit, though lack edge detection and AI selection. It has excellent cataloging functions, and overall superb image quality. It’s a good Lightroom alternative.

CONS: It’s costly to purchase, and more expensive than Adobe’s Creative Cloud to subscribe to. It can easily soften stars if not careful. It lacks AI masking, and overall the program tends to lag behind competitors by a few years for advanced features — Capture One added panorama stitching only a couple of versions back. I found the program also tended to litter my drive with Capture One folders.

Darktable

IMAGE QUALITY: Poor

PROS: It’s free! And it offers many adjustments and intricate options not found elsewhere that the technically minded will enjoy experimenting with.

CONS: Darktable’s community of developers has added a bewildering array of panels in a confusing interface, making Darktable not for beginners nor the feint of heart. I struggled with it, all for poor results. Just finding the Export function was a challenge. Darktable is a program designed by programmers for use by other programmers who love to play with image data, and who care little for a user interface friendly to “the rest of us!”

DxO PhotoLab 6

IMAGE QUALITY: Excellent

PROS: Along with Capture One, I found DxO PhotoLab capable of producing a good-looking image, the equal of or perhaps better than Camera Raw, partly because of DxO’s ClearView and Smart Lighting options. It has lots of downloadable camera and lens modules for automatic lens corrections. Its noise reduction was excellent, though its DeepPrime and DeepPrimeXD options can add AI artifacts.

CONS: There are no adjustment layers or masks as such. Local adjustments are done through DxO’s quirky Control Point interface which isn’t as visually intuitive nor as precise as masks and layers. As of PhotoLab 6, DxO has yet to offer panorama or HDR merging, lagging far behind the competition.

Exposure X7

IMAGE QUALITY: Fair

PROS: Exposure has a full set of tonal and color adjustments, and essential image management functions. It has good local adjustment layers, though with no AI or smart brushes to automatically detect edges. It produced acceptable final results, though still looking a little flat.

CONS: Exposure lacks any panorama stitching or HDR merging functions. Its noise reduction can wipe out stars and image details, and its sharpening adds dark halos to stars. It often crashed during my testing, by simply quitting unexpectedly. Annoying.

Luminar Neo

IMAGE QUALITY: Good to Excellent

PROS: Luminar has a clean, fresh interface with many powerful AI-driven functions and effects unique to Luminar and that are easy to apply. The final result looks fine. Its AI masks work quite well. Neo also works as a plug-in for Photoshop or Lightroom.

CONS: Luminar is expensive to purchase outright with all the Extensions, with a subscription the most economical method of acquiring, and maintaining, the full package. Its Noiseless AI didn’t handle starfields well. Neo lacks a useable cataloging function, and the version tested had numerous serious bugs. It is best for editing just single images.

ON1 Photo RAW 2023

IMAGE QUALITY: Good

PROS: ON1 Photo RAW is the only program of the set that can: catalog images, develop raw files, and then layer and stack images, performing all that Lightroom and Photoshop can do. It can serve as a one-program solution, and has excellent Effects and NoNoise AI, also available as plug-ins for Adobe software. It offers layer-based editing as well.

CONS: ON1 consistently produces dark halos around stars from over-sharpening in its raw engine. These cannot be eliminated. Its AI selection routines are flawed. Its AI noise reduction can leave artifacts if applied too aggressively, which is the default setting. Opening images from the Browse module as layers in the Edit module can be slow. It offers no stack modes (present in Photoshop and Affinity) for easy noise smoothing or star trail stacking, and the alternative — changing layer Blend modes — has to be done one at a time for each layer, a tedious process for a large image stack.

Why Didn’t I Test …?

… [Insert your favorite program here!] No doubt it’s one you consider badly neglected by all the world’s photographers!

But … as I stated at the outset, I tested only programs offered for both MacOS and Windows. I tested the MacOS versions — and for nightscapes, which are more demanding than normal daytime scenes.

Icons for the programs not tested. How many can you identify? Hint: They are in alphabetical order.

I did not test:

Adobe Photoshop Elements —Effectively Photoshop “Lite,” Elements is available for $99 as a one-time purchase with a perpetual license, for both MacOS and Windows. Optional annual updates cost about $80. While it offers image and adjustment layers, and can open .PSD files, Elements cannot do much with 16-bit images, and has limited functions for developing raw files, in its version of Camera Raw “Lite.” And its Lightroom-like Organizer module does not not have any Copy & Paste Settings or batch export functions, making it unsuitable for batch editing or time-lapse production.

Like Apple’s Photos and other free photo apps, I don’t consider Elements to be a serious option for nightscape and time-lapse work. A Creative Cloud Photo subscription doesn’t cost much more per year, yet gets you far, far more in Adobe’s professional-level software.

Corel PaintShop — As with ACDSee’s product suite, Corel’s PaintShop is available in Pro and Pro Ultimate versions, both updated for 2023, and each with extensive raw and layer-based editing features. But they are only for Windows. If you are a PC user, PaintShop is certainly worth testing out. Their neglected MacOS program (also available for Windows and Linux) is the raw developer AfterShot Pro 3 (currently at v3.7.0.446). It is labeled as being from 2017, and last received a minor bug fix update in January 2021. I included it in my 2017 survey, but could not this year as it refused to recognize the CR3 raw files from my Canon R5 and R6 cameras.

Darkroom and Acorn are two Mac-only apps wth just basic features. There are no doubt numerous other similar Windows-only apps that I am not familiar with.

GIMP — Being free, it has its loyal fans. But it is not a raw developer, so it is not tested here. It is favorite of some astrophotographers as a no-cost substitute for Adobe Photoshop or Affinity Photo. It’s available for MacOS and Windows.

Iridient Developer — Its anachronistic, text-only website looks like it comes from 1995, giving the impression that this raw developer should be free, open-source software. It isn’t; it costs $99. It is a basic raw developer but only for MacOS. It is updated frequently, and a trial copy is available.

Pixelmator Pro — While it is a very capable and well-supported program with some excellent features, it too is available only for MacOS. Like Affinity Photo, it seems to be primarily for editing individual raw images, and lacks any image management functions, notably Copy & Paste Settings.

PixInsight — This specialized astrophoto program is designed for deep-sky image processing and bringing out the most subtle structures in faint nebulas and galaxies. For those it works wonders. But it is not suitable for nightscapes. Examples I’ve seen from PI fans who have used it for nightscapes, including images I’ve sent them for their expert processing, have not impressed me.

RawTherapee — As of early January 2023 when I completed my testing, the latest version of this free open-source program, v5.9, was available only for Windows and Linux. The MacOS version was still back at v5.8 from February 2020, a version that was unable to open the Canon CR3 raw files I was using in my tests. While the CR3 format has been out for several years, RawTherapee was still not supporting it, a hazard of open-source software dependent on the priorities of volunteer programmers who mostly use Windows. Like Darktable, RawTherapee is an incredibly complex program to use, with programmers adding every possible panel, slider and checkbox they could think of. [UPDATE MARCH 2023: RawTherapee 5.9 for MacOS is now available and opens Canon .CR3 files. Mac users might certainly want to try it. And Windows users, too!]

Topaz Studio — While Topaz Labs has been busy introducing some fine AI specialty programs, such as DeNoise AI, their main photo editor, Topaz Studio, has been neglected for years and, as of late 2022, was not even listed as a product for sale. It’s gone.

What About? — To prevent the number of programs tested from growing even larger, I did not include a few other little-known and seldom-used programs such as Cyberlink PhotoDirector and Picktorial, though I’m sure they have their fans.

I also did not test any camera manufacturer programs, such as Canon’s Digital Photo Professional, Nikon’s CaptureNX, or Sony’s ImagingEdge. They will open raw images only from their own cameras. Few photographers use them unless forced to, perhaps to open new raw files not yet supported by Adobe, DxO, et al, or to access files created by special camera functions such as Pixel Shift or Raw Burst Mode.

Recommendations

Having used Adobe software for decades, I’m used to its workings and the look it provides images. I’ve yet to see any of the competitors produce results so much better that they warrant me switching programs. At best, the competitors produce results as good as Adobe, at least for nightscape astrophotos, though with some offering unique and attractive features.

For example, the AI noise reduction routines in DxO PhotoLab and ON1 Photo RAW can outperform Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. Adobe needs to update its raw editing software with more advanced noise reduction and sharpening. Even so, the AI routines in the competitors are prone to creating odd artifacts, so have to be applied carefully to astrophotos.

A possible workflow: DxO PhotoLab or Capture One into Affinity Photo

As I recommended in 2017, for those who refuse to use Adobe — or any software by subscription — a possible combination for the best astrophoto image quality might be DxO PhotoLab 6 for raw developing and basic time-lapse processing, paired with Affinity Photo 2 for stacking and compositing still images, from finished TIFF files exported out of DxO then opened and layered with Affinity.

An example of images developed in Capture One and then layered and masked in Affinity Photo.

The pairing of Capture One with Affinity could work just as well, though is more costly. And anyone who hates software by subscription in principle might want to avoid Capture One as they are pushing customers toward buying only by subscription, as is ON1.

For a single-program solution, I’d recommend ON1 Photo RAW more highly, if only it produced better star image quality. Its raw engine continues to over-sharpen, and its AI masking functions are flawed, though will likely improve. I routinely use ON1’s Effects plug-in from Photoshop, as it has some excellent “finishing-touch” filters such as Dynamic Contrast. I find ON1’s NoNoise AI plug-in also very useful.

The same applies to Luminar Neo. While I can’t see using it as a principle processing program, it works very well as a Photoshop plug-in for adding special effects, some with its powerful and innovative AI routines.

Finally — Download Trials and Test!

But don’t take my word for all of this. Please test for yourself!

With the exception of Luminar Neo, all the programs I tested (and others I didn’t, but you might be interested in) are available as free trial copies. Try them out on your images and workflow. You might find you like one program much better than any of the others or what you are using now.

Often, having more than one program is useful, if only for use as a plug-in from within Lightroom or Photoshop. Some plug-ins made for Photoshop also work from within Affinity Photo, though it is hit-and-miss what plug-ins will actually work. (In my testing, plug-ins from DxO/Nik Collection, Exposure X7, ON1, RC-Astro, and Topaz all work; ones from Skylum/Luminar install but fail to run.)

LRTimelapse working on the meteor shower time-lapse frames.

While I was impressed with Capture One and DxO PhotoLab, for me the need to use the program LRTimelapse (shown above) for processing about 80 percent of all the time-lapse sequences I shoot means the question is settled. LRTimelapse works only with Adobe software, and the combination works great and improves wth every update of LRTimelapse.

Even for still images, the ease of working within Adobe’s ecosystem to sort, develop, layer, stack, and catalog images makes me reluctant to migrate to a mix of programs from different companies, especially when the cost of upgrading many of those programs is not much less than, or even more costly, than an Adobe Photo plan subscription.

However … if it’s just a good raw developer you are after for astro work, without paying for a subscription, try Capture One 2023 or DxO PhotoLab 6. Try Affinity Photo if you want a good Photoshop replacement.

Clear skies! And thanks for reading this!

November 15, 2022March 25, 2023

Testing Noise Reduction Programs for Astrophotography

In a detailed technical blog I compare six AI-based noise reduction programs for the demands of astrophotography. Some can work wonders. Others can ruin your image.

Over the last two years we have seen a spate of specialized programs introduced for removing digital noise from photos. The new generation of programs use artificial intelligence (AI), aka machine learning, trained on thousands of images to better distinguish unwanted noise from desirable image content.

At least that’s the promise – and for noisy but normal daytime images they do work very well.

But in astrophotography our main subjects – stars – can look a lot like specks of pixel-level noise. How well can each program reduce noise without eliminating stars or wanted details, or introducing odd artifacts, making images worse.

To find out, I tested six of the new AI-based programs on real-world – or rather “real-sky” – astrophotos. Does one program stand out from the rest for astrophotography?

NOTE: All the images are full-resolution JPGs you can tap or click on to download for detailed inspection. But that does make the blog page slow to load initially. Patience!

TL;DR SUMMARY

The new AI-trained noise reduction programs can indeed eliminate noise better than older non-AI programs, while leaving fine details untouched or even sharpening them.

Of the group tested, the winner for use on just star-filled images is a specialized program for astrophotography, NoiseXTerminator from RC-Astro.

For nightscapes and other images, Topaz DeNoise AI performed well, better than it did in earlier versions that left lots of patchy artifacts, something AI programs can be prone to.

While ON1’s new NoNoise AI 2023 performed fine, it proved slightly worse in some cases than its earlier 2022 version. Its new sharpening routine needs work.

Other new programs, notably Topaz Photo AI and Luminar’s Noiseless AI, also need improvement before they are ready to be used for the rigours of astrophotography.

For reasons explained below, I would not recommend DxO’s PureRAW².

The three test images in Adobe Camera Raw showing the Basic settings applied.

METHODOLOGY

As described below, while some of the programs can be used as stand-alone applications, I tested them all as plug-ins for Photoshop, applying each as a smart filter applied to a developed raw file brought into Photoshop as a Camera Raw smart object.

Most of these programs state that better results might be obtainable by using the stand-alone app on original raw files. But for my personal workflow I prefer to develop the raw files with Adobe Camera Raw, then open those into Photoshop for stacking and layering, applying any further noise reduction or sharpening as non-destructive smart filters.

Many astrophotographers also choose to stack unedited original images with specialized stacking software, then apply further noise reduction and editing later in the workflow. So my workflow and test procedures reflect that.

However, the exception is DxO’s PureRAW². It can work only on raw files as a stand-alone app, or as a plug-in from Adobe Lightroom. It does not work as a Photoshop plug-in. I tested PureRAW² by dropping raw Canon .CR3 files onto the app, then exporting the results as raw DNG files, but with the same settings applied as with the other raw files. For the nightscape and wide-field images taken with lenses in DxO’s extensive database, I used PureRAW’s lens corrections, not Adobe’s.

As shown above, I chose three representative images:

A nightscape with star trails and a detailed foreground, at ISO 1600.
A wide-field deep-sky image at ISO 1600 with an 85mm lens, with very tiny stars.
A close-up deep-sky image taken with a telescope and at a high ISO of 3200, showing thermal noise hot pixels.

Each is a single image, not a stack of multiple images.

Before applying the noise reduction, the raw files received just basic color corrections and a contrast boost to emphasize noise all the more.

THE CONTENDERS

In the test results for the three images, I show the original raw image, plus a version with noise reduction and sharpening applied using Adobe Camera Raw’s own sliders, with luminance noise at 40, color noise at 25, and sharpening at 25.

I use this as a base comparison, as it has been the noise reduction I have long applied to images. However, ACR’s routine (also found in Adobe Lightroom) has not changed in years. It is good, but it is not AI.

The new smart AI programs should improve upon this. But do they?

PLEASE NOTE:

I have refrained from providing prices and explaining buying options, as frankly some can be complex!
For those details and for trial copies, go to the software’s website by clicking on the link in the header product names below.
All programs are available for Windows and MacOS. I tested the latter versions.
I have not provided tutorials on how to use the software; I have just reported on their results. For trouble-shooting their use, please consult the software company in question.

ON1 NoNoise AI 2023

ON1’s main product is the Lightroom/Photoshop alternative program called ON1 Photo RAW, which is updated annually to major new versions. It has full cataloging options like Lightroom and image layering like Photoshop. Its Edit module contains the NoNoise AI routine. But NoNoise AI can be purchased as a stand-alone app that also installs as a plug-in for Lightroom and Photoshop. It’s what I tested here. The latest 2023 version of NoNoise AI added ON1’s new Tack Sharp AI sharpening routine.

Version tested: 17.0.1

Topaz DeNoise AI

This program has proven very popular and has been adopted by many photographers – and astrophotographers – as an essential part of an editing workflow. It performs noise reduction only, offering a choice of five AI models. Auto modes can choose the models and settings for you based on the image content, but you can override those by adjusting the strength, sharpness, and recovery of original detail as desired.

A separate program, Topaz Sharpen AI, is specifically for image sharpening, but I did not test it here. Topaz Gigapixel AI is for image resizing.

Version tested: 3.7.0

Topaz Photo AI

In 2022 Topaz introduced this new program which incorporates the trio of noise reduction, sharpening and image resizing in one package. Like DeNoise, Sharpen and Gigapixel, Photo AI works as a stand-alone app or as a plug-in for Lightroom and Photoshop. Photo AI’s Autopilot automatically detects and applies what it thinks the image needs. While it is possible to adjust settings, Photo AI offers much less control than DeNoise AI and Topaz’s other single-purpose programs.

As of this writing in November 2022 Photo AI is enjoying almost weekly updates, and seems to be where Topaz is focusing its development and marketing effort.

Version tested: 1.0.9

Luminar Neo’s Edit interface with choices of many filters and effects, including Noiseless AI.

Luminar Neo Noiseless AI

Unlike the other noise reduction programs tested here, Luminar Neo from the software company Skylum is a full-featured image editing program, with an emphasis on one-click AI effects. One of those is the new Noiseless AI, available as an extra-cost extension to the main Neo program, either as a one-time purchase or by annual subscription. Noiseless AI cannot be purchased on its own. However, Neo with most of its extensions does work as a plug-in for Lightroom and Photoshop.

Being new, Luminar Neo is also updated frequently, with more extensions coming in the next few months.

Version tested: 1.5.0

DxO PureRAW’s simple interface with few choices for Noise Reduction settings.

DxO PureRAW²

Like ON1, DxO makes a full-featured alternative to Adobe’s Lightroom for cataloging and raw developing called DxO PhotoLab, in version 6 as of late 2022. It contains DxO’s Prime and DeepPrime noise reduction routines. However, as with ON1, DxO has spun off just the noise reduction and lens correction parts of PhotoLab into a separate program, PureRAW², which runs either as a stand-alone app or as a plug-in for Lightroom – but not Photoshop, as PureRAW works only on original raw files.

Unlike all the other programs, PureRAW² offers essentially no options to adjust settings, just the option to apply, or not, lens corrections, and to choose the output format. For this testing I applied DeepPrime and exported out to DNG files.

Version tested: 2.2

Noise Terminator’s controls allow adjusting strength and detail.

RC-Astro NoiseXTerminator

Unlike the other programs tested, NoiseXTerminator from astrophotographer Russell Croman is designed specifically for deep-sky astrophotography. It installs as a plug-in for Photoshop or Affinity Photo, but not Lightroom. It is also available under the same purchased licence as a “process” for PixInsight, an advanced program popular with astrophotographers, as it is designed just for editing deep-sky images.

I tested the Photoshop plug-in version of Noise XTerminator. It receives occasional updates to both the actual plug-in and separate updates to the AI module.

Version tested: 1.1.2, AI model 2

NIGHTSCAPE TEST

As with the other test images, the panels show a highly magnified section of the image, indicated in the inset. I shot the image of Lake Louise in Banff, Alberta with a Canon RF15-35mm lens on a 45-megapixel Canon R5 camera at ISO 1600.

The test results on a sample nightscape.

Adobe Camera Raw’s basic noise reduction did a good job, but like all general routines it does soften the image as a by-product of smoothing out high-ISO noise.

ON1 NoNoise 2023 retained landscape detail better than ACR but softened the star trails, despite me adding sharpening. It also produced a somewhat patchy noise smoothing in the sky. This was with Luminosity backed off to 75 from the auto setting (which always cranks up the level to 100 regardless of the image), and with the Tack Sharp routine set to 40 with Micro Contrast at 0. It left a uniform pixel-level mosaic effect in the shadow areas. Despite the new Tack Sharp option, the image was softer than with last year’s NoNoise 2022 version (not shown here as it is no longer available) which produced better shadow results.

Topaz DeNoise AI did a better job than NoNoise retaining the sharp ground detail while smoothing noise, always more obvious in the sky in such images. Even so, it also produced some patchiness, with some areas showing more noise than others. This was with the Standard model set to 40 for Noise and Sharpness, and Recover Details at 75. I show the other model variations below.

Topaz Photo AI did a poor job, producing lots of noisy artifacts in the sky and an over-sharpened foreground riddled with colorful speckling. It added noise. This was with the Normal setting and the default Autopilot settings.

Noiseless AI in Luminar Neo did a decent job smoothing noise while retaining, indeed sharpening ground detail without introducing ringing or colorful edge artifacts. The sky was left with some patchiness and uneven noise smoothing. This was with the suggested Middle setting (vs Low and High) and default levels for Noise, Detail and Sharpness. However, I do like Neo (and Skylum’s earlier Luminar AI) for adding other finishing effects to images such as Orton glows.

DxO PureRAW² did smooth noise very well while enhancing sharpness quite a lot, almost too much, though it did not introduce obvious edge artifacts. Keep in mind it offers no chance to adjust settings, other than the mode – I used DeepPrime vs the normal Prime. Its main drawback is that in making the conversion back to a raw DNG image it altered the appearance of the image, in this case darkening the image slightly. It also made some faint star trails look wiggly!

Noise XTerminator really smoothed out the sky, and did so very uniformly without doing much harm to the star trails. However, it smoothed out ground detail unacceptably, not surprising given its specialized training on stars, not terrestrial content.

Conclusion: For this image, I’d say Topaz DeNoise AI did the best, though not perfect, job.

This was surprising, as tests I did with earlier versions of DeNoise AI showed it leaving many patchy artifacts and colored edges in places. Frankly, I was put off using it. However, Topaz has improved DeNoise AI a lot.

Why it works so well, when Topaz’s newer program Photo AI works so poorly is hard to understand. Surely they use the same AI code? Apparently not. Photo AI’s noise reduction is not the same as DeNoise AI.

Similarly, ON1’s NoNoise 2023 did a worse job than their older 2022 version. One can assume its performance will improve with updates. The issue seems to be with the new Tack Sharp addition.

NoiseXTerminator might be a good choice for reducing noise in just the sky of nightscape images. It is not suitable for foregrounds.

WIDE-FIELD IMAGE TEST

I shot this image of Andromeda and Triangulum with an 85mm Rokinon RF lens on the 45-megapixel Canon R5 on a star tracker. Stars are now points, with small ones easily mistaken for noise. Let’s see how the programs handle such an image, zooming into a tiny section showing the galaxy Messier 33.

The test results on a sample wide-field deep-sky image.

Adobe Camera Raw’s noise and sharpening routines do take care of the worst of the luminance and chrominance noise, but inevitably leave some graininess to the image. This is traditionally dealt with by stacking multiple sub-exposures.

ON1 NoNoise 2023 did a better job than ACR, smoothing the worst of the noise and uniformly, without leaving uneven patchiness. However, it did soften star images, almost like it was applying a 1- or 2-pixel gaussian blur, adding a slight hazy look to the image. And yet the faintest stars that appeared as just perceptible blurs in the original image were sharpened to one- or two-pixel points. This was with only NoNoise AI applied, and no Tack Sharp AI. And, as I show below, NoNoise’s default “High Detail” option introduced with the 2022 version and included in the 2023 edition absolutely destroys star fields. Avoid it.

ON1 NoNoise “High Detail” option ruins star fields, as shown at right. Use “Original” instead.

Topaz DeNoise AI did a better job than Camera Raw, though it wasn’t miles ahead. This was with the Standard setting. Its Low Light and Severe models were not as good, surprising as you might think one of those choices would be the best for such an image. It pays to inspect Topaz’s various models’ results. Standard didn’t erase stars; it actually sharpened the fainter ones, almost a little too much, making them look like specks of noise. Playing with Enhance Sharpness and Recover Detail didn’t make much difference to this behavior.

Topaz Photo AI again performed poorly. Its Normal mode left lots of noise and grainy artifacts. While its Strong mode shown here did smooth background noise better, it softened stars, wiping out the faint ones and leaving colored edges on the brighter ones.

Noiseless AI in Luminar Neo did smooth fine noise somewhat, better than Camera Raw, but still left a grainy background, though with the stars mostly untouched in size and color.

DxO PureRAW²did eliminate noise quite well, while leaving even the faintest stars intact, unlike with the deep-sky image below, which is odd. However, it added some dark halos to bright stars from over-sharpening. And, as with the nightscape example, PureRAW’s output DNG was darker than the raw that went in. I don’t want noise reduction programs altering the basic appearance of an image, even if that can be corrected later in the workflow.

Noise XTerminator performed superbly, as expected – after all, this is the subject matter it is trained to work on. It smoothed out random noise better than any of the other programs, while leaving even the faintest stars untouched, in fact sharpening them slightly. Details in the little galaxy were also unharmed.

Conclusion: The clear winner was NoiseXTerminator.

Topaz DeNoise was a respectable second place, performing better than it had done on such images in earlier versions. Even so, it did alter the appearance of faint stars which might not be desirable.

ON1 NoNoise 2023 also performed quite well, with its softening of brighter stars yet sharpening of fainter ones perhaps acceptable, even desirable for an effect.

TELESCOPIC DEEP-SKY TEST

I shot this image of the NGC 7822 complex of nebulosity with a SharpStar 61mm refractor, using the red-sensitive 30-megapixel Canon Ra and with a narrowband filter to isolate the red and green light of the nebulas.

Again, the test image is a single raw image developed only to re-balance the color and boost the contrast. No dark frames were applied, so the 8-minute exposure at ISO 3200 taken on a warm night shows thermal noise as single “hot pixel” white specks.

The test results on a sample deep-sky close-up.

Adobe Camera Raw did a good job smoothing the worst of the noise, suppressing the hot pixels but only by virtue of it softening all of the image slightly at the pixel level. However, it leaves most stars intact.

ON1 NoNoise 2023 also did a good job smoothing noise while also seeming to boost contrast and structure slightly. But as in the wide-field image, it did smooth out star images a little, though somewhat photogenically, while still emphasizing the faintest stars. This was with no sharpening applied and Luminosity at 60, down from the default 100 NoNoise applies without fail. One wonders if it really is analyzing images to produce optimum settings. With no Tack Sharp sharpening applied, the results on this image with NoNoise 2023 looked identical to NoNoise 2022.

Topaz DeNoise AI did another good job smoothing noise, while leaving most stars unaffected. However, the faintest stars and hot pixels were sharpened to be more visible tiny specks, perhaps too much, even with Sharpening at its lowest level of 1 in Standard mode. Low Light and Severe modes produced worse results, with lots of mottling and unevenness in the background. Unlike NoNoise, at least its Auto settings do vary from image to image, giving you some assurance it really is responding to the image content.

Topaz Photo AI again produced unusable results. Its Normal modes produced lots of mottled texture and haloed stars. Its Strong mode shown here did smooth noise better, but still left lots of uneven artifacts, like DeNoise AI did in its early days. It certainly seems like Photo AI is using old hand-me-down code from DeNoise AI.

Noiseless AI in Luminar Neo did smooth noise but unevenly, leaving lots of textured patches. Stars had grainy halos and the program increased contrast and saturation, adjustments usually best left for specific adjustment layers dedicated to the task.

DxO PureRAW² did smooth noise very well, including wiping out the faintest specks from hot pixels, but it also wiped out the faintest stars, I think unacceptably and more than other programs like DeNoise AI. For this image it did leave basic brightness alone, likely because it could not apply lens corrections to an image taken with unknown optics. However, it added an odd pixel-level mosaic-like effect on the sky background, again unacceptable.

Noise XTerminator did a great job smoothing random noise without affecting any stars or the nebulosity. The Detail level of 20 I used actually emphasized the faintest stars, but also the hot pixel specks. NoiseXTerminator can’t be counted on to eliminate thermal noise; that demands the application of dark frames and/or using dithering routines to shift each sub-frame image by a few pixels when autoguiding the telescope mount. Even so, Noise XTerminator is so good users might not need to take and stack as many images.

Conclusion: Again, the winner was NoiseXTerminator.

Deep-sky photographers have praised “NoiseX” for its effectiveness, either when applied early on in a PixInsight workflow or, as I do in Photoshop, as a smart filter to the base stacked image underlying other adjustment layers.

Topaz DeNoise is also a good choice as it can work well on many other types of images. But again, play with its various models and settings. Pixel peep!

ON1 NoNoise 2023 did put in a respectable performance here, and it will no doubt improve – it had been out less than a month when I ran these tests.

Based on its odd behavior and results in all three test images I would not recommend DxO’s PureRAW². Yes, it reduces noise quite well, but it can alter tone and color in the process, and add strange pixel-level mosaic artifacts.

COMPARING DxO and TOPAZ OPTIONS

DxO and Topaz DeNoise AI offer the most choices of AI models and strength of noise reduction. Here I compare:

Topaz DeNoise AI on the nightscape image using three of its models: Standard (which I used in the comparisons above), plus Low Light and Severe. These show how the other models didn’t do as good a job.

The set below also compares DeNoise AI to Topaz’s other program, Photo AI, to show how poor a job it is doing in its early form. Its Strong mode does smooth noise but over-sharpens and leaves edge artifacts. Yes, Photo AI is one-click easy to use, but produces bad results – at least on astrophotos.

Comparing DeNoise’s and Photo AI’s different model settings.

As of this writing DxO’s PureRAW² offers the Prime and newer DeepPrime AI models – I used DeepPrime for my tests.

However, DxO’s more expensive and complete image processing program, PhotoLab 6, also offers the even newer DeepPrimeXD model, which promises to preserve or recover even more “Xtra Detail” over the DeepPrime model. As of this writing, the XD mode is not offered in PureRAW². Perhaps that will wait for PureRAW³, no doubt a paid upgrade.

[UPDATE MARCH 2023: DxO has indeed brought out PureRaw³ as a paid upgrade that, as expected, offers the DeepPrimeXD. In testing the new version I found that, while it did not seem to alter an image’s exposure as PureRaw² did, DeepPrime and DeepPrimeXD still unacceptably ruin starry skies, by either adding a fine-scale mosaic effect (DeepPrime) or weird wormy artifacts (DeepPrimeXD). Try it for yourself to see if you find the same.]

Comparing DxO’s various Prime model settings. DeepPrimeXD is only in PhotoLab 6.

The set above compares the three noise reduction models of DxO’s PhotoLab 6. DeepPrime does do a better job than Prime. DeepPrimeXD does indeed sharpen detail more, but in this example it is too sharp, showing artifacts, especially in the sky where it is adding structures and textures that are not real.

However, when used from within PhotoLab 6, the DeepPrime noise reduction becomes more usable. PhotoLab is then being used to perform all the raw image processing, so PureRAW’s alteration of color and tone is not a concern. Conversely, it can also output raw DNGs with only noise reduction and lens corrections applied, essentially performing the same tasks as PureRAW. If you have PhotoLab, you don’t need PureRAW.

COMPARING AI TO OLDER NON-AI PROGRAMS

The new generation of AI-based programs have garnered all the attention, leaving older stalwart noise reduction programs looking a little forlorn and forgotten.

Here I compare Camera Raw and two of the best of the AI programs, Topaz DeNoise AI and NoiseXTerminator, with two of the most respected of the “old-school” non-AI programs:

Dfine2, included with the Nik Collection of plug-ins sold by DxO (shown above), and

Reduce Noise v9 sold by Neat Image (shown below).

Neat Image’s Reduce Noise control interface – the simple panel.

I tested both by using them in their automatic modes, where they analyze a section or sections of the image and adjust the noise reduction accordingly, but then apply that setting uniformly across the entire image. However, both allow manual adjustments, with Neat Image’s Reduce Noise offering a bewildering array of technical adjustments.

How do these older programs stack up to the new AI generation? Here are comparisons using the same three test images.

Comparing results with Neat Image and Nik Dfine2 on the nightscape test image.

In the nightscape image, Nik Dfine2 and Neat Image’s Reduce Noise did well, producing uniform noise reduction with no patchiness. But the results weren’t significantly better than with Adobe Camera Raw’s built-in routine. Like ACR, both non-AI programs did smooth detail in the ground, compared to DeNoise AI which sharpened the mountain details.

Comparing results with Neat Image and Nik Dfine2 on the wide-field test image.

In the tracked wide-field image, the differences were harder to distinguish. None performed up to the standard of Noise XTerminator, with both Nik Dfine2 and Neat Image softening stars a little compared to DeNoise AI.

Comparing results with Neat Image and Nik Dfine2 on the deep-sky test image.

In the telescopic deep-sky image, all programs did well, though none matched NoiseXTerminator. None eliminated the hot pixels. But Nik Dfine2 and Neat Image did leave wanted details alone, and did not alter or eliminate desired content. However, they also did not eliminate noise as well as did Topaz DeNoise AI or NoiseXTerminator.

The AI technology does work!

YOUR RESULTS MAY VARY

I should add that the nature of AI means that the results will certainly vary from image to image.

In addition, with many of these programs offering multiple models and settings for strength and sharpening, results even from the same program can be quite different. In this testing I used either the program’s auto defaults or backed off those defaults where I thought the effect was too strong and detrimental to the image.

Software is also a constantly moving target. Updates will alter how these programs perform, we hope for the better. For example, two days after I published this test, ON1 updated NoNoise AI to v17.0.2 with minor fixes and improvements.

And do remember I’m testing on astrophotos, and pixel peeping to the extreme. Rave reviews claiming how well even the poor performers here work on “normal” images might well be valid.

This is all by way of saying, your mileage may vary!

So don’t take my word for it. Most programs (Luminar Neo is an exception) are available as free trial copies to test out on your astro-images and in your preferred workflow. Test for yourself. But do pixel peep. That’s where you’ll see the flaws.

WHAT ABOUT ADOBE?

In the race for AI supremacy, one wonders where Adobe is in the field.

In the last couple of years Adobe has introduced several amazing and powerful “Neural Filters” into Photoshop, which work wonders with one click. And Lightroom and Camera Raw have received powerful AI-based selection and masking tools far ahead of most of the competition, with only Luminar Neo and ON1 Photo RAW coming close with similar auto-select capabilities.

Neural network Noise Reduction is coming to Photoshop. One day!

But AI Noise Reduction? You think it would be a high priority.

A neural filter for Noise Reduction is on Adobe’s Wait List for development, so perhaps we will see something in the next few months from Adobe to compete with the AI offerings of Topaz, ON1 and Luminar/Skylum.

Until then we have lots of choices for third party programs that all improve with every update. I hope this review has helped you make a choice.

— Alan, November 15, 2022 / AmazingSky.com

September 20, 2022September 21, 2022

Testing a Trio of Canon RF Zoom Lenses for Astrophotography

In a detailed review, I test a “holy trinity” of premium Canon RF zoom lenses, with astrophotography the primary purpose.

In years past, zoom lenses were judged inferior to fixed-focal length “prime” lenses for the demands of astrophotography. Stars are the severest test of a lens, revealing optical aberrations that would go unnoticed in normal images, or even in photos of test charts. Many older zooms just didn’t cut it for discerning astrophotographers, myself included.

The new generation of premium zooms for mirrorless cameras, from Canon, Nikon and Sony, are dispelling the old wisdom that primes are better than zooms. The new zooms’ optical performance is proving to be as good, if not better than the older generation of prime lenses for DSLR cameras, models often designed decades ago.

The shorter lens-to-sensor “flange distance” offered by mirrorless cameras, along with new types of glass, provide lens designers more freedom to correct aberrations, particularly in wide-angle lenses.

While usually slower than top-of-the-line primes, the advantage of zoom lenses is their versatility for framing and composing subjects, great for nightscapes and constellation shots. It’s nice to have the flexibility of a zoom without sacrificing the optical quality and speed so important for astrophotography. Can we have it all? The new zooms come close to delivering.

**The “holy trinity” of Canon zooms tested were purchased in 2021 and 2022. From L to R they are: RF15-35mm, RF28-70mm, and RF70-200mm**

A good thing, because with Canon we have little choice! For top-quality glass in wide-angle focal lengths at least, zooms are the only choice for their mirrorless R cameras. As of this writing in late 2022, Canon has yet to release any premium primes for their RF mount shorter than 50mm. Rumours are a 12mm, 24mm, 28mm, and 35mm are coming! But when?

The three zooms I tested are all “L” lenses, designating them as premium-performance models. I have not tested any of Canon’s “economy” line of RF lenses, such as their 24mm and 35mm Macro STM primes. Tests I’ve seen suggest they don’t offer the sharpness I desire for most astrophotography.

Contributing to the lack of choice, top-quality third-party lenses from the likes of Sigma (such as their new 20mm and 24mm Art lenses made for mirrorless cameras) have yet to appear in Canon RF mount versions. Will they ever? In moves that evoked much disdain, Samyang and Viltrox were both ordered by Canon to cease production of their RF auto-focus lenses.

For their mirrorless R cameras, Canon has not authorized any third-party lens makers, forcing you to buy costly Canon L glass, or settle for their lower-grade STM lenses, or opt for reverse-engineered manual-focus lenses from makers such as TTArtisan and Laowa/Venus Optics. While they are good, they are not up to the optical standards of Canon’s L-series glass.

I know, as I own several RF-mount TTArtisan wide-angle lenses and the Laowa 15mm f/2 lens. You can find my tests of those lenses at AstroGearToday.com. Look under Reviews: Astrophotography Gear.

**RF lenses will fit only on Canon R-series mirrorless cameras. This shows the RF15-35mm on the Canon R5 used for the lens testing.**

The trio of RF lenses tested here work on all Canon EOS R-series cameras, including their R7 and R10 cropped-frame cameras. However, they will not work on any Canon DSLRs.

Two of the lenses, the RF15-35mm F/2.8 and RF70-200mm F/4, are designs updated from older Canon DSLR lenses with similar specs. The RF28-70mm F/2 does not have an equivalent focal length range and speed in Canon’s DSLR lens line-up. Indeed, nobody else makes a lens this fast covering the “normal” zoom range.

Together, the three lenses cover focal lengths from 15mm to 200mm, with some overlap. A trio of zooms like this — a wide-angle, normal, and telephoto — is often called a “holy trinity” set, a popular combination all camera manufacturers offer to cover the majority of applications.

However, my interest was strictly for astrophotography, with stars the test subjects.

NOTE: CLICK or TAP on a test image to download a full-resolution image for closer inspection. The images, while low-compression JPGs, are large and numerous, and so will take time to fully load and display. Patience!

METHODOLOGY

I tested the trio of lenses on same-night exposures of a starry but moonlit sky, using the 45-megapixel Canon R5 camera mounted on a motorized star tracker to follow the rotating sky. With one exception noted, any distortion of stars from perfect pinpoints is due to lens aberrations, not star trailing. The brighter moonlit sky helped reveal non-uniform illumination from lens vignetting.

I shot each lens wide-open at its maximum aperture, as well as one stop down from maximum, to see how aberrations and vignetting improved.

I did not test auto-focus performance, nor image stabilization (only the RF28-70mm lacks internal IS), nor other lens traits unimportant for astro work such as bokeh or close focus image quality.

I also compared the RF15-35mm on same-night dark-sky tests against a trio of prime lenses long in my stable: the Rokinon 14mm SP, and Canon’s older L-series 24mm and 35mm primes, all made for DSLRs.

**The lenses each come with lens hoods that use a click-on mechanism much easier to twist on and off than with the older design used on Canon EF lenses.**

TL;DR SUMMARY

Each of the Canon “holy trinity” of zoom performs superbly, though not without some residual lens aberrations such as corner astigmatism and, in the RF28-70mm, slight chromatic aberration at f/2.

However, what flaws they show are well below the level of many older prime lenses made for DSLR cameras.

The RF lenses’ major optical flaw is vignetting, which can be quite severe at some focal lengths, such as in the RF70-200mm at 200mm. But this flaw can be corrected in processing.

These are lenses that can replace fixed-focal length primes, though at considerable cost, in part justifiable in that they negate the need for a suite of many prime lenses.

The performance of these and other new lenses made for mirrorless cameras from all brands is one good reason to switch from DSLR to mirrorless cameras.

Lens Specs and Applications

Canon RF15-35mm F/2.8 L IS USM

**The RF15-35mm is a fine nightscape lens. It extends slightly when zooming with the lens physically longest at its shortest 15mm focal length.**

The Canon RF15-35mm F/2.8 L is made primarily for urban photography and landscapes by day. My main application is using it to take landscapes by night, and auroras, where its relatively fast f/2.8 speed helps keeps exposure times short and ISO speeds reasonably low. However, the RF15-35mm can certainly be used for tracked wide-angle Milky Way and constellation portraits.

The lens weighs a moderate 885 grams (31 ounces or 1.9 pounds) with lens hood and end caps, and accepts 82mm filters, larger than the 72mm or 77mm filter threads of most astrophoto-friendly lenses. Square 100mm filters will work well on the lens, even at the 15mm focal length. There are choices, such as from KASE, for light pollution reduction and star diffusion filters in this size and format. I have reviews of these filters at AstroGearToday.com, both here for light pollution filters and here for starglow filters.

Canon offers a lower-cost alternative in this range, their RF14-35mm. But it is f/4, a little slow for nightscape, aurora, and Milky Way photography. I have not tested one.

Canon RF28-70mm F/2 L USM

**The RF28-70mm works great for tracked starfields and constellations. It extends when zooming, with it longest at its 70mm focal length.**

The big Canon RF28-70mm F/2 is aimed at wedding and portrait photographers, though the lens is suitable for landscape work. While I do use it for nightscapes, my primary use is for tracked Milky Way and constellation images, where its range of fields of view nicely frames most constellations, from big to small.

I justified its high cost by deciding it replaces (more or less!) prime lenses in the common 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm focal lengths. Its f/2 speed does bring it into fast prime lens territory. It’s handy to have just one lens to cover the range.

Canon offers a lower-cost alternative here, too, their RF24-70mm. But it is f/2.8. While this is certainly excellent speed, I like having the option of shooting at f/2. An example is when using narrowband nebula filters such as red hydrogen-alpha filters, where shooting at f/2 keeps exposures shorter and/or ISOs lower when using such dense filters. I use this lens with an Astronomik 12-nanometre H-α clip-in filter. An example is in one of the galleries below.

While a clip-in filter shifts the infinity focus point inward (to as close as the 2-metre mark with the RF28-70mm at 28mm, and to 6 metres at 70mm), I did not find that shift adversely affected the lens’s optical performance. That’s not true of all lenses.

Make no mistake, the RF28-70mm is one hefty lens, weighing 1530 grams (54 ounces or 3.4 pounds). Its front-heavy mass demands a solid tripod head. Its large front lens accepts big 95mm filters, a rare size with few options available. I found one broadband light pollution filter in this size, from URTH. Otherwise, you need to use in-body clip-in filters. Astronomik makes a selection for Canon EOS R cameras.

Canon RF70-200mm F/4 L IS USM

**The RF70-200mm works well for closeups of landscape scenes such as moonrises. It extends the most of all the lenses when zooming to its longest focal length.**

The Canon RF70-200mm F/4 is another portrait or landscape lens. I use it primarily for bright twilight planet conjunctions and moonrise scenes, where its slower f/4 speed is not a detriment. However, as my tests show, it can be used for tracked deep-sky images, where it is still faster than most short focal length telescopes.

The RF70-200mm lens weighs 810 grams (28 ounces, or 1.75 pounds) with lens hood and caps, so is light for a 70-to-200mm zoom. It is also compact. At just 140mm long when set to 70mm, it is actually the shortest lens of the trio. However, the barrel extends to 195mm long when zoomed out to 200mm focal length.

Canon offers the more costly and, at 1200 grams, heavier RF70-200mm F/2.8 lens which might be a better choice for deep-sky imaging where the extra stop of speed can be useful. But in this case, I chose the slower, more affordable – though still not cheap – f/4 version. It accepts common 77mm filters, as does the f/2.8 version.

Centre Sharpness

Canon RF15-35mm F/2.8 L IS USM

**This compares 400% blow-ups of the frame centres at the two extreme focal lengths and at two apertures: wide open at f/2.8 and stopped down to f/4.**

Like the other two zoom lenses tested, the RF15-35mm is very sharp on axis. Even wide open, there’s no evidence of softness and star bloat from spherical aberration, the bane of cheaper lenses.

Coloured haloes from longitudinal chromatic aberration are absent, except at 28mm and 35mm (shown here) when wide open at f/2.8, where bright stars show a little bit of blue haloing. At f/4, this minor level of aberration disappears.

Canon RF28-70mm F/2 L USM

**This compares 400% blow-ups of the frame centres at the two extreme focal lengths and at two apertures: wide open at f/2 and stopped down to f/2.8.**

The big RF28-70mm is also very sharp on-axis but is prone to more chromatic aberration at f/2, showing slight magenta haloes on bright stars at the shorter focal lengths and pale cyan haloes at 70mm in my test shots. Such false colour haloes can be very sensitive to precise focus, though with refractive optics the point of least colour is often not the point of sharpest focus.

At f/2, stars are a little softer at 70mm than at 28mm. Stopping down to f/2.8 eliminates this slight softness and most of the longitudinal chromatic aberration.

Canon RF70-200mm F/4 L IS USM

**This compares 400% blow-ups of the frame centres at the two extreme focal lengths and at two apertures: wide open at f/4 and stopped down to f/5.6.**

Unlike prime telephotos I’ve used, the RF70-200mm shows negligible chromatic aberration on-axis at all focal lengths, even at f/4. Stars are a little softer at the longest focal length at f/4, perhaps from slight spherical aberration, though my 200mm test shots are also affected by a little mistracking, trailing the stars slightly.

Stopping down to f/5.6 sharpens stars just that much more at 200mm.

Corner Aberrations

The corners are where we typically separate great lenses from the merely good. And it is where zoom lenses have traditionally performed badly. For example, my original Canon EF16-35mm f/2.8 lens was so bad off-axis I found it mostly unusable for astro work. Not so the new RF15-35mm, which is the RF replacement for Canon’s older EF16-35mm.

To be clear – in these test shots you might think the level of aberrations are surprising for premium lenses. But keep in mind, to show them at all I am having to pixel-peep by enlarging all the test images by 400 percent, cropping down to just the extreme corners.

Check the examples in the Compared to DSLR Lenses section and in the Finished Images Galleries for another look at lens performance in broader context.

Canon RF15-35mm F/2.8 L IS USM

**This compares 400% blow-ups of the extreme corners at five focal lengths with the RF15-35mm wide open at f/2.8**

Surprisingly, this RF’s best performance off-axis is actually at its shortest focal length. At 15mm it exhibits only some slight tangential astigmatism, elongating stars away from the frame centre. At 24mm aberrations appear slightly worse than at the other focal lengths, showing some flaring from sagittal astigmatism and perhaps coma as well, aberrations seen to a lesser degree at 28mm and 35mm, making stars look like little three-pointed triangles.

**This compares 400% blow-ups of the extreme corners at five focal lengths with the RF15-35mm stopped down one stop to f/4.**

The aberrations reduce when stopped down to f/4, but are still present, especially at 24mm, this lens’s weakest focal length, though only just.

While the RF15-35mm isn’t perfect, it outperforms other prime lenses I have, and that I suspect most users will own or have used in the past with DSLRs. Only new wide-angle premium primes for the RF mount, if and when we see them, will provide better performance.

Canon RF28-70mm F/2 L USM

**This compare 400% blow-ups of the extreme corners at four focal lengths with the RF28-70mm wide open at f/2.**

The RF28-70mm’s fast f/2 speed, unusual for any zoom lens, was surely a challenge to design for. Off-axis when wide open at f/2 it does show astigmatism at the extreme corners at all focal lengths, but the least at 50mm, and the worst at 28mm where a little lateral chromatic aberration is also visible, adding slight colour fringing.

**This compare 400% blow-ups of the extreme corners at four focal lengths with the RF28-70mm stopped down one stop to f/2.8.**

Sharpness off-axis improves markedly when stopped down one stop to f/2.8, where at 50mm stars are now nearly perfect to the corners. Indeed, performance is so good at 50mm, I think there would be little need to buy the Canon RF50mm prime, unless its f/1.2 speed is deemed essential.

With the RF28-70mm at f/2.8, stars still show some residual astigmatism at 28mm and 35mm, but only at the extreme corners.

Canon RF70-200mm F/4 L IS USM

**This compare 400% blow-ups of the extreme corners at four focal lengths with the RF70-200mm wide open at f/4.**

The RF70-200mm telephoto zoom shows some astigmatism and coma at the corners when wide open at f/4, with it worse at the shorter focal lengths. While lens corrections have been applied here, the 200mm image still shows a darker corner from the vignetting described below.

**This compare 400% blow-ups of the extreme corners at four focal lengths with the RF70-200mm stopped down one stop to f/5.6.**

Stopping down to f/5.6 eliminates most of the off-axis aberrations at 135mm and 200mm focal lengths but some remain at 70mm and to a lesser degree at 100mm.

This is a lens that can be used at f/4 even for the demands of deep-sky imaging, though perfectionists will want to stop it down. At f/5.6 it is similar in speed to many astrographic refractors, though most of those start at about 250mm focal length.

Frame Vignetting

In the previous test images, I applied lens corrections (but no other adjustments) to each of the raw files in Adobe Camera Raw, using the settings ACR automatically selects from its lens database. These corrections brightened the corners.

In this next set I show the lenses’ weakest point, their high level of vignetting. This light falloff darkens the corners by a surprising amount. In the new generation of lenses for mirrorless cameras, it seems lens designers are choosing to sacrifice uniform frame illumination in order to maximize aberration corrections. The latter can’t be corrected entirely, if at all, by software.

However, corrections applied either in-camera or at the computer can brighten corners, “flattening” the field. I show that improvement in the section that follows this one.

Canon RF15-35mm F/2.8 L IS USM

**This compares the level of vignetting present in the RF15-35mm without the benefit of lens corrections, showing the difference at five focal lengths.**

In the wide-angle zoom, vignetting darkens just the corners at 15mm, but widens to affect progressively more of the frame at the longer focal lengths. The examples show the entire right side of the frame. I show the effect just at f/2.8.

Though I don’t show examples with the two wider zooms, with all lenses vignetting decreases dramatically when each lens is stopped down by even one stop. The fields become much more evenly illuminated, though some darkening at the very corners remains one stop down.

Canon RF28-70mm F/2 L USM

**This compares the level of vignetting present in the RF28-70mm without the benefit of lens corrections, showing the difference at four focal lengths.**

In this “normal” zoom, vignetting performance is similar at all focal lengths, though it affects a bit more of the field at 70mm than at 28mm. Again, while I’m not presenting an example, vignetting decreases a lot when this lens is stopped down to f/2.8. While the extra stop of speed is certainly nice to have at times, I usually shoot the RF28-70mm at f/2.8.

Canon RF70-200mm F/4 L IS USM

**This compares the level of vignetting present in the RF70-200mm without the benefit of lens corrections, showing the difference at four focal lengths.**

In this telephoto zoom, vignetting is fairly mild at the shorter focal lengths but becomes severe at 200mm, affecting much of the field. It is far worse than I see with my older Canon EF200mm f/2.8 prime, a lens that is not as sharp at f/4 as the RF zoom.

The faster RF70-200mm f/2.8 lens, which I had the chance to test one night last year, showed as much, if not more, vignetting than the f/4 version. See my test here at AstroGearToday.com. I thought the f/4 version would be better for vignetting, but it is not.

**This shows how much the RF-70-200mm’s vignetting improves when it is stopped down.**

In this case, as the vignetting is so prominent at 200mm, I show above how much it improves when stopped down to f/5.6, in a comparison with the lens at f/4, both with no lens corrections applied in processing. The major improvement comes from the smaller aperture alone. For twilight scenes, I’d suggest stopping this lens down to better ensure a uniform sky background.

LENS Corrections

In this next set I show how well applying lens corrections improves the vignetting at the focal lengths where each of the lenses is at its worse, and with each at its widest aperture.

I show this with Adobe Camera Raw but Lightroom would provide identical results. I did not test lens corrections with other programs such as CaptureOne, DxO PhotoLab, or ON1 Photo Raw, which all have automatic lens corrections as well.

Canon RF15-35mm F/2.8 L IS USM

**This compare the RF15-35mm lens at f/2.8 and 35mm with and without lens corrections applied, to show how much they improve the vignetting.**

Applying lens corrections in Adobe Camera Raw certainly brightened the corners and edges, though still left some darkening at the very corners that can be corrected by hand in the Manual tab.

Canon RF28-70mm F/2 L USM

**This compare the RF28-70mm lens at f/2 and 70mm with and without lens corrections applied, to show how much they improve the vignetting.**

ACR’s lens corrections helped but did not completely eliminate the vignetting here. Corner darkening remained. Manually increasing the vignetting slider can provide that extra level of correction needed.

Canon RF70-200mm F/4 L IS USM

**This compare the RF70-200mm lens at f/4 and 200mm with and without lens corrections applied, to show how much they improve the vignetting.**

The high level of vignetting with this lens at 200mm largely disappeared with lens corrections, though not entirely. For deep-sky imaging, users might prefer to shoot and apply flat-field frames. I prefer to apply automatic and manual corrections to the raw files, to stay within a raw workflow as much as possible.

Same Focal Length Comparisons

With the trio of lenses offering some of the same focal lengths, here I show how they compare at three of those shared focal lengths. I zoom into the upper right corners here, as with the Corner Aberrations comparisons above.

RF15-35mm vs. RF28-70mm at 28mm

**This compares the RF15-35mm at 28mm to the RF28-70mm also at 28mm and with both at f/2.8.**

With both lenses at 28mm and at the same f/2.8 aperture (though the RF28-70mm is now stopped down one stop), it’s a toss up. Both show corner aberrations, though of a different mix, distorting stars a little differently. The RF28-70mm shows some lateral chromatic aberration, but the RF15-35mm shows a bit more flaring from astigmatism.

RF15-35mm vs. RF28-70mm at 35mm

**This compares the RF15-35mm at 35mm to the RF28-70mm also at 35mm and with both at f/2.8.**

The story is similar with each lens at 35mm. Stars seem a bit sharper in the RF15-35mm though are elongated more by astigmatism at the very corners. Lens corrections have been applied here and with the other two-lens comparison pairs.

RF28-70mm vs. RF70-200mm at 70mm

**This compares the RF28-70mm at 70mm and f/2.8 to the RF70-200mm also at 70mm but wide open at f/4.**

Here I show the RF28-70mm at f/2.8 and the RF70-200mm wide open at f/4, with both set to 70mm focal length. The telephoto lens shows a little more softening and star bloating from corner aberrations, though both perform well.

Compared to DSLR Lenses

Here I try to demonstrate just how much better at least one of the zooms on test here is compared to older prime lenses made for DSLRs. The Canon lenses are labeled EF, for Canon’s EF lens mount used for decades on their DSLRs and EOS film cameras. Both are premium L lenses.

I shot this set on a different night than the previous examples, with some light cloud present which added various amounts of glows around stars. But the test shots still show corner sharpness and aberrations well, in this case of the upper left corners of all frames.

Canon RF15-35mm at 35mm vs. Canon EF35mm L

**This compares the RF15-35mm zoom at 35mm to the older EF35mm L prime lens**. **Some light cloud added the glows at right.**

The Canon EF35mm is the original Mark I version, which Canon replaced a few years ago with an improved Mark II model. So I’m sure if you were to buy an EF35mm lens now (or if that’s the model you own) it will perform better than what I show here.

Both lenses are at f/2.8, wide open for the RF lens, but stopped down two stops for the f/1.4 EF lens.

The zoom lens is much sharper to the corners, with far less astigmatism and none of the lateral chromatic aberration and field curvature (softening stars at the very corner) of the old EF35mm prime. I thought the EF35mm was a superb lens, and used it a lot over the last 15 years for Milky Way panoramas. I would not use it now!

Canon RF15-35mm at 24mm vs. Canon EF24mm L

**This compares the RF15-35mm zoom at 24mm to the older EF24mm L prime lens.** **Some light cloud added the glows at right.**

Bought in the early years of DSLRs, the EF24mm tested here is also an original Mark I model, since replaced by an improved Mark II 24mm. The old 24mm is good, but shows more astigmatism than the RF lens, and some field curvature and purple chromatic aberration not present at all in the RF lens.

And this is comparing it to the RF lens at its weakest focal length, 24mm. It still handily outperforms the old EF24mm prime.

Canon RF15-35mm at 15mm vs. Rokinon 14mm SP

**This compares the RF15-35mm at 15mm to the Rokinon 14mm SP prime lens.**

Canon once made an EF14mm f/2.8 L prime, but I’ve never used it. For a lens in this focal length, one popular with nightscape photographers, I’ve used the ubiquitous Rokinon/Samyang 14mm f/2.8 manual lens. While a bargain at about $300, I always found it soft and aberrated at the corners. See my test of 14mm ultra-wides here.

A few years ago I upgraded to the Rokinon 14mm f/2.4 lens in their premium SP series (about $800 for the EF-mount version). While a manual lens, it does have electrical contacts to communicate lens metadata to the camera. Like all EF-mount lenses from any brand, it can be adapted to Canon R cameras using Canon’s $100 EF-EOS R lens adapter.

**Older DSLR lenses like the Rokinon SP can be adapted to all Canon R cameras with the Canon lens adapter ring which transmits lens data to the camera.**

The Rokinon SP is the only prime I found that beat the RF zoom. It provided sharper images to the corners than the RF15-35mm at 15mm. The Rokinon also offers the slightly faster maximum aperture of f/2.4 (which Canon cameras register as f/2.5). Vignetting is severe, but like the RF lenses can be corrected – Camera Raw has this lens in its database. What is not so easy to correct is some slight colour shift at the corners.

Another disadvantage, as with many other 14mm lenses, is that the SP lens cannot accept front-mounted filters. The RF15-35mm can.

Nevertheless, until Canon comes out with a 12mm to 14mm RF prime, or allows Sigma to, an adapted Rokinon 14mm SP is a good affordable alternative to the RF15-35mm.

**The RF15-35mm (left) takes 82mm filters, the RF28-70mm (centre) requires 95mm filters, but the RF70-200mm (right) can accept common 77mm filters.**

Mechanical Points

All the RF lens bodies are built of weight-saving engineered plastic incorporating thorough weather sealing. There is nothing cheap about their fit, finish or handling. Each lens has textured grip rings for the zoom, focus and a control ring that can be programmed to adjust either aperture, ISO, exposure compensation or other settings of your choosing.

As with all modern auto-focus lenses, the manual focus ring on each lens does not mechanically move glass. It controls a motor that in turn focuses the lens, so-called “focus-by-wire.” However, I found that focus could be dialled in accurately. But if the camera is turned off, then on again, the lens will not return to its previous focus position. You have to refocus to infinity each time the camera is powered up, a nuisance.

Unlike some Nikon, Sony, Samyang, and Sigma lenses, none of the Canon lenses have a focus lock button, or any way of presetting an infinity focus point, or simply having the lens remember where it was last set. I would hope Canon could address that deficiency in a firmware update.

With all the zooms, I did not find any issue with “zoom creep.” The telescoping barrels remained in place during long exposures and did not slowly retract when aimed up. While the RF28-70mm and RF70-200mm each have a zoom lock switch, it locks the lens only at its shortest focal length.

Each lens is parfocal within its zoom range. Focus at one zoom position, and it will be in focus for all the focal lengths. I usually focus at the longest focal length where it is easiest to judge focus by eye, then zoom out to frame the scene.

FINISHED IMAGES GALLERIES

Here I present a selection of final, processed images (four for each lens), so you can better see how each performs on real-world celestial subjects. To speed download, the images are downsized to 2048 pixels wide.

As per my comments at top, the RF15-35mm is my primary nightscape lens, the RF28-70mm my lens for wide-field constellation and Milky Way shots, while the RF70-200mm is for conjunctions and Moon scenes. It would also be good for eclipses.

Image Gallery with Canon RF15-35mm F/2.8 L IS USM

Image Gallery with Canon RF28-70mm F/2 L USM

Image Gallery with Canon RF70-200mm F/4 L IS USM

Click on the images to bring them up full screen with caption information.

CONCLUSIONs and recommendations

If you are a Canon user switching from your aging but faithful DSLR to one of their mirrorless R cameras, each of these lenses will perform superbly for astrophotography. At a price! Each is costly. But the cost of older EF lenses has also increased in recent months.

The other native RF L-series lenses in this focal length range, Canon’s RF50mm and RF85mm f/1.2 primes, are stunning … but also expensive. As I’m sure any coming RF wide-angle L primes will be, if and when they ever appear!

**This shows the relative difference in size and height of the lens trio, with all collapsed to their minimum size.**

The cheaper alternative – not the least because you might already own them! – is using adapted EF-mount lenses made for DSLRs, either from Canon or other brands. But in many cases, as I’ve shown, the new RF glass is sharper, especially when on a high-resolution camera such as the Canon R5 I used for all the testing.

And there’s the harsh reality that Canon is discontinuing many EF lenses. You can now buy some only used. For example, the EF135mm f/2 L and EF200mm f/2.8 L are both gone.

Until Canon licenses other companies to issue approved lenses for their RF mount – if that happens at all – our choices for native RF lenses are limited. However, the quality of Canon’s L lenses is superb. I now use these zooms almost exclusively, and financed most of their considerable cost by selling off a ream of older cameras and lenses.

If there’s one lens to buy for most astrophotography, it might be the big RF28-70mm F/2, a zoom lens that comes close to offering it all: flexibility, optical quality and speed. The RF24-70mm F/2.8 is a more affordable choice, though I have not tested one.

If nightscapes are the priority, the RF15-35mm F/2.8 would see a lot of use, as perhaps the only lens you’d need.

Of the trio, the RF70-200mm was the lowest priority on my wish list. But it has proven to be very useful for framing horizon scenes.

The superb optics of these and other new lenses made for mirrorless cameras is one good reason to upgrade from a DSLR to a mirrorless camera, in whatever brand you prefer.

June 22, 2022June 23, 2022

Testing the Canon R5 for Astrophotography

In a format similar to my other popular camera tests, I put the 45-megapixel Canon R5 mirrorless camera through its paces for the demands of astrophotography.

In a sequel to my popular post from September 2021 where I reviewed the Canon R6 mirrorless camera, here is a similar test of its higher-megapixel companion, the Canon R5. Where the R6 has a modest 20-megapixel sensor with relatively large 6.6-micron pixels, the R5 is (at present) Canon’s highest megapixel camera, with 45 megapixels. Each pixel is only 4.4 microns across, providing higher resolution but risking more noise.

Is the higher noise noticeable? If so, does that make the R5 less than ideal for astrophotography? To find out, I tested an R5 purchased locally in Calgary from The Camera Store in May 2022.

NOTE: CLICK orTAP on any image to bring it up full screen for closer inspection. The blog contains a lot of high-res images, so they may take a while to all load. Patience! Thanks!

**The Canon R5 uses a full-frame sensor offering 45 megapixels, producing images with 8192 x 5464 pixels, and making 8K video possible.**

TL;DR Summary

The Canon R5 proved to be surprisingly low in noise, and has worked very well for nightscape, lunar and deep-sky photography (as shown below), where its high resolution does produce a noticeable improvement to image detail, with minimal penalty from higher noise. Its 8K video capability has a place in shooting the Moon, Sun and solar eclipses. It was not so well suited to shooting videos of auroras.

This is a stack of 12 x 5-minute exposures with a Sharpstar 94EDPH refractor at f/4.5 and the Canon R5 at ISO 800, taken as a test of the R5 for deep-sky imaging. No filters were employed. Close-ups of sub-frames from this shoot with the R5, and also with the R6 and Ra, are used throughout the review.

R5 Pros

The Canon R5 is superb for its:

High resolution with relatively low noise
ISO invariant sensor performance for good shadow recovery
Good live view display with ISO boost in Movie mode
8K video has its attraction for eclipse photography
Good top LCD information screen missing in the R6
No magenta edge “amp glow” that the R6 shows
Higher 6x and 15x magnifications for precise manual focusing
Good battery life
Pro-grade Type N3 remote port

R5 Cons

The Canon R5 is not so superb for its:

Noise in stills and movies is higher than in the R6
Propensity for thermal-noise hot pixels in shadows
Not so suitable for low-light video as the R6
Overheating in 8K video
Live View image is not as bright as in the R6’s Movie mode
High cost!

**The flip-out screen of the R5 (and all recent Canon cameras) requires an L-bracket with a notch in the side (a Small Rig unit is shown here) to accommodate the tilting screen.**

CHOOSING THE R5

Since late 2019 my main camera for all astrophotography has been the Canon Ra, a limited-edition version of the original R, Canon’s first full-frame mirrorless camera that started the R series. The Ra had a special infra-red cutoff filter in front of the sensor that passed a higher level of visible deep-red light, making it more suitable for deep-sky astrophotography than a standard DSLR or DSLM (mirrorless) camera. The Ra was discontinued after two years on the market, a lifetime similar to Canon’s previous astronomical “a” models, the 20Da and 60Da.

I purchased the Canon R6 in late 2021, primarily to use it as a low-light video camera for aurora photography, replacing the Sony a7III I had used for several years and reviewed here. Over the last year, I sold all my non-Canon cameras, as well as the Canon 6D MkII DSLR (reviewed here), to consolidate my camera gear to just Canon mirrorless cameras and lenses.

The R6 has proven to be an able successor to the Sony for me, with the R6’s modest megapixel count and larger pixels making it excellent for low-light video. But the higher resolution of the R5 was still attractive. So I have now added it to my Canon stable. Since doing so, I have put it through several of my standard tests to see how suitable it is for the demands of astrophotography, both stills and video.

Here are my extensive results, broken down by various performance criteria. I hope you will find my review useful in helping you make a purchase decision.

LIVE VIEW FRAMING

**This compares the back-of-camera views of the R5 vs. the R6, with both set to their highest ISO in Movie mode for the brightest preview image.**

First, why go mirrorless at all? For astrophotography, the big difference compared to even a high-end DSLR, is how much brighter the “Live View” image is when shooting at night. DSLM cameras are always in Live View – even the eye-level viewfinder presents a digital image supplied by the sensor.

And that image is brighter, often revealing more than what a DSLR’s optical viewfinder can show, a great advantage for framing nightscape scenes, and deep-sky fields at the telescope.

The R5 certainly presents a good live view image. However, it is not as bright nor as detailed as what the R6 can provide when placed in its Movie mode and with the ISO bumped up to the R6’s highest level of ISO 204,800, where the Milky Way shows up, live!

The R5 only goes as high as ISO 51,200, and so as I expected it does not provide as bright or detailed a preview at night as the R6 can. However, the R5 is better than the original R for live-view framing, and better than any Canon DSLR I’ve used.

LIVE VIEW FOCUSING

As with other Canon mirrorless cameras, the R5 offers a Focus Assist overlay (top) to aid manual focusing. It works on bright stars. It also has a 6x and 15x magnifications for even more precise focusing.

Like the R6, the R5 can autofocus accurately on bright stars and planets. By comparison, while the Ra can autofocus on distant bright lights, it fails on bright stars or planets.

Turning on Focus Peaking makes stars turn red, yellow or blue (your choice of colours) when they are in focus, as a reassuring confirmation.

**Turning on Focus Guide provides the arrowed overlays shown above.**

In manual focus, an additional Focus Aid overlay, also found in the R6, provides arrows that close up and turn green when in focus on a bright star or planet.

Or, as shown above, you can zoom in by 6x or 15x to focus by eye the old way by examining the star image. These are magnification levels higher than the 5x and 10x of the R6 and most other Canon cameras, and are a great aid to precise focusing, necessary to make full use of the R5’s high resolution, and the sharpness of Canon’s RF lenses. The 15x still falls short of the Ra’s 30x for ultra-precise focusing on stars, but it’s a welcome improvement nonetheless.

In all, while the R5 is not as good as the R6 for framing in low light, it is better for precise manual focusing using its higher 15x magnification.

NOISE PERFORMANCE — NIGHTSCAPES

The key camera characteristic for astrophoto use is noise. There is no point in having lots of resolution if, at the high ISOs we use for most astrophotography, the detail is lost in noise. But I was pleasantly surprised that proved not to be the case with the R5.

As I show below, noise is well controlled, making the R5 usable for nightscapes at ISOs up to 3200, if not 6400 when needed in a pinch.

**This compares the noise on a dark nightscape at the typical ISOs used for such scenes. A level of noise reduction shown has been applied in Camera Raw.**

With 45 megapixels, at the upper end of what cameras offer today, the R5 has individual pixels, or more correctly “photosites,” that are each 4.4 microns in size, the “pixel pitch.”

This is still larger than the 3.7-micron pixels in a typical 24-megapixel cropped-frame camera like the Canon R10, or the 3.2-micron pixels found in a 32-megapixel cropped-frame camera like the Canon R7. Both are likely to be noisier than the R5, though will provide even higher resolution, as well as greater magnification with any given lens or telescope.

By comparison, the 30-megapixel full-frame R (and Ra) has a pixel pitch of 5.4 microns, while the 20-megapixel R6’s pixel pitch is a generous 6.6 microns. Only the 12-megapixel Sony a7SIII has larger 8.5-micron pixels, making it the low-light video champ.

The bigger the photosites (i.e. the larger the pixel pitch), the more photons each photosite can collect in a given amount of time – and the more photons they can collect, period, before they overfill and clip highlights. More photons equals more signal, and therefore a better signal-to-noise ratio, while the greater “full-well depth” yields higher dynamic range.

However, each generation of camera improves the signal-to-noise ratio by suppressing noise via its sensor design and improved signal processing hardware and firmware. The R5 and R6 each use Canon’s latest DIGIC X processor.

**This compares the R5 to the R6 and Ra cameras at the high ISOs of 3200 and 6400 often used for Milky Way nightscapes.**

In nightscapes the R5 did show more noise at high ISOs, especially at ISO 6400, than the R6 and Ra, but the difference was not large, perhaps one stop at most, if that. What was noticeable was the presence in the R5 of more hot pixels from thermal noise, as described later.

**This compares the R5 to the R6 and Ra cameras at the more moderate ISOs of 800 and 1600 used for brighter nightscapes.**

At slower ISOs the R5 showed a similar level of noise as the R6 and Ra, but a finer-grained noise than the R6, in keeping with the R5’s smaller pixels. In this test set, the R5 did not exhibit noticeably more noise than the other two cameras. This was surprising.

NOTE: In these comparisons I have not resampled the R5 images down to the megapixel count of the R6 to equalize them, as that’s not what you would do if you bought an R5. Instead, I have magnified the R6 and Ra’s smaller images so we examine the same area of each camera’s images.

As with the R6, I also saw no “magic ISO” setting where the R5 performed better than at other settings. Noise increased in proportion to the ISO speed. The R5 proved perfectly usable up to ISO 3200, with ISO 6400 acceptable for stills when necessary. But I would not recommend the R5 for those who like to shoot Milky Way scenes at ISO 12,800.

For nightscapes, a good practice that would allow using lower ISO speeds would be to shoot the sky images with a star tracker, then take separate long untracked exposures for the ground.

NOTE: In my testing I look first and foremost at actual real-world results. For those interested in more technical tests and charts, I refer you to DxOMark’s report on the Canon R5.

NOISE PERFORMANCE — DEEP-SKY

This compares the R5 at the typical ISO settings used for deep-sky imaging, with no noise reduction applied to the raw files for this set. The inset shows the portion of the frame contained in the blow-ups.

Deep-sky imaging with a tracking mount is more demanding, due to its longer exposures of up to several minutes for each “sub-frame.”

On a series of deep-sky exposures through a telescope, above, the R5 again showed quite usable images up to ISO 1600 and 3200, with ISO 6400 a little too noisy in my opinion unless a lot of noise reduction was applied or many images were shot to stack later.

**This compares the R5 to the R6 and Ra cameras at ISO 6400, higher than typically used for deep-sky imaging. No noise reduction was applied to the raw files.**

As with the nightscape set, at high ISOs, such as at ISO 6400, the R5 did show more noise than the R6 and Ra, as well as more colour splotchiness in the dark sky, and lower contrast. The lower dynamic range of the R5’s smaller pixels is evident here.

Just as with nightscapes, the lesson with the R5 is to keep the ISO low if at all possible. That means longer exposures with good auto-guiding, but that’s a best practice with any camera.

**This compares the R5 to the R6 and Ra cameras at the lower ISOs of 800 and 1600 best for deep-sky imaging, for better dynamic range. No noise reduction was applied to the raw files.**

At lower ISOs that provide better dynamic range, shown above, the difference in noise levels between the three cameras was not that obvious. Each camera presented very similar images, with the R6 having a coarser noise than the Ra and R5.

In all, I was surprised the R5 performed as well as it did for deep-sky imaging. See my comments below about its resolution advantage.

ISO INVARIANCY

The flaw in many Canon DSLRs, one documented in my 2017 review of the 6D Mark II, was their poor dynamic range due to the lack of an ISO invariant sensor design.

Canon R-series mirrorless cameras have largely addressed this weakness. As with the R and R6, the sensor in the R5 appears to be nicely ISO invariant.

Where ISO invariancy shows itself to advantage is on nightscapes where the starlit foreground is often dark and underexposed. Bringing out detail in the shadows in raw files requires a lot of Shadow Recovery or increasing the Exposure slider. Images from an ISO invariant sensor can withstand the brightening “in post” far better, with minimal noise increase or degradations such as a loss of contrast, added banding, or horrible discolourations.

**This shows the same scene with the R5 progressively underexposed by shooting at a lower ISO then boosted in exposure in Adobe Camera Raw.**

As I do for such tests, I shot sets of images at the same shutter speed, one well-exposed at a high ISO, then several at successively lower ISOs to underexpose by 1 to 4 stops. I then brightened the underexposed images by increasing the Exposure in Camera Raw by the same 1 to 4 stops. In an ideal ISO invariant sensor, all the images should look the same.

The R5 performed well in images underexposed by up to 3 stops. Images underexposed by 4 stops started to fall apart with low contrast and a magenta cast. This was worse performance than the R6, which better withstood underexposure by as much as 4 stops, and fell apart at 5 stops of underexposure.

While it can withstand underexposure, the lesson with the R5 is to still expose nightscapes as well as possible, likely requiring a separate longer exposure for the dark ground. Expose to the right! Don’t depend on being able to save the image by brightening “in post.” But again, that’s a best practice with any camera.

THERMAL NOISE

Here I repeat some of the background information from my R6 review. But it bears repeating, as even skilled professional photographers often misunderstand the various forms of noise and how to mitigate them.

All cameras will exhibit thermal noise in long exposures, especially on warm nights. This form of heat-induced noise peppers the shadows with bright or “hot” pixels, often brightly coloured.

This is not the same as the shot and read noise that adds graininess to high-ISO images and that noise reduction software can smooth out later in post.

Thermal noise is more insidious and harder to eliminate in processing without harming the image. However, Monika Deviat offers a clever method here at her website.

I found the R5 was prone to many hot pixels in long nightscape exposures where they show up in dark, underexposed shadows. I did not find a prevalence of hot pixels in well-exposed deep-sky images.

LONG EXPOSURE NOISE REDUCTION

With all cameras a setting called Long Exposure Noise Reduction (LENR) eliminates this thermal noise by taking a “dark frame” and subtracting it in-camera to yield a raw file largely free of hot pixels, and other artifacts such as edge glows.

The LENR option on the R5 did eliminate most hot pixels, though sometimes still left, or added, a few (or they might be cosmic ray hits). LENR is needed more on warm nights, and with longer exposures at higher ISOs. So the extent of thermal noise in any camera can vary a lot from shoot to shoot, and season to season.

**This compares a long exposure of nothing (with the lens cap on), both without LENR (left) and with LENR (right), to show the extent of just the thermal noise.**

The comparison above shows just thermal noise in long exposures with and without LENR, to show its effectiveness. However, bear in mind in this demo the raw files have been boosted a lot in exposure and contrast (using DxO PhotoLab with the settings shown) to exaggerate the visibility of the noise.

Like the R6, when LENR is actively taking a dark frame, the R5’s rear screen indicates “Busy,” which is annoyingly bright at night, exactly when you would be employing LENR. To hide this display, the only option is to close the screen. Instead, the unobtrusive top LCD screen alone should be used to indicate a dark frame is in progress. It does with the Ra, though Busy also displays on its rear screen as well, which is unnecessary.

As with all mirrorless cameras, the R5 lacks the “dark frame buffer” present in Canon full frame DSLRs that allows several exposures to be taken in quick succession even with LENR on.

**Long Exposure Noise Reduction is useful when the gap in time between exposures it produces is not critical.**

With all Canon R cameras, turning on LENR forces the camera to take a dark frame after every light frame, doubling the time it takes to finish every exposure. That’s a price many photographers aren’t willing to pay, but on warm nights I find it can be essential, and a best practice, for the reward of cleaner images out of camera. I found it is certainly a good practice with the R5.

TIP: If you find hot pixels are becoming more obvious over time, try this trick: turn on the Clean Manually routine for 30 seconds to a minute. In some cameras this can remap the hot pixels so the camera can better eliminate them.

STAR QUALITY

Using LENR with the R5 did not introduce any oddities such as oddly-coloured, green or wiped-out stars. Even without LENR I saw no evidence of green stars, a flaw that plagues some Sony cameras at all times, or Nikons when using LENR.

**This is a single developed raw frame from the stack of four minute exposures used to create the final image shown at the top. It shows sharp and nicely coloured stars, with no odd green stars.**

Canons have always been known for their good star colours, and the R5 maintains the tradition. According to DPReview the R5 has a mild low-pass anti-alias filter in front of its sensor. Cameras which lack such a sensor filter do produce sharper images, but stars that occupy only one or two pixels might not de-Bayer properly into the correct colours. I did not find that an issue with the R5.

As in the R6, I also saw no evidence of “star-eating,” a flaw Nikons and Sonys have been accused of over the years, due to aggressive in-camera noise reduction even on raw files. Canons have largely escaped charges of star-eating.

RED SENSITIVITY

The R5 I bought was a stock “off-the-shelf” model. It is Canon’s now-discontinued EOS Ra that was “filter-modified” to record a greater level of the deep-red wavelength from red nebulas in the Milky Way. As I show below, compared to the Ra, the R5 did well, but could not record the depth of nebulosity the Ra can, to be expected for a stock camera.

However, bright nebulas will still be good targets for the R5. But if it’s faint nebulosity you are after, both in wide-field Milky Way images and telescopic close-ups, consider getting an R5 “spectrum modified” by a third-party supplier. Or modifying an EOS R.

**This compares identically processed four-minute exposures at ISO 800 with the R5 vs. the red-sensitive Ra.**

EDGE ARTIFACTS and EDGE GLOWS

DSLRs are prone to vignetting along the top and bottom of the frame from shadowing by the upraised mirror and mirror box. Not having a mirror, and a sensor not deeply recessed in the body, largely eliminates this edge vignetting in mirrorless cameras.

While the Ra shows a very slight vignetting along the bottom of the frame (visible in the example above), the R5 was clean and fully illuminated to the edges, as it should be.

I was also pleased to see the R5 did not exhibit any annoying “amp glows” — dim, often magenta glows at the edge of the frame in long exposures, created by heat emitted from sensor electronics adding infrared (IR) glows to the image.

I saw noticeable amp glows in the Canon R6 which could only be eliminated by taking LENR dark frames. It’s a flaw that has yet to be eliminated with firmware updates. Taking LENR darks is not required with the R5, except to reduce thermal hot pixels as noted above.

With a lack of IR amp glows, the R5 should work well when filter-modified to record either more visible Hydrogen-alpha red light, or deeper into the infrared spectrum.

Resolution — Nightscapes

Now we come to the very reason to get an R5, its high resolution. Is the difference visible in typical astrophotos? In a word, yes. If you look closely.

If people only see your photos on Facebook or Instagram, no one will ever see any improvement in your images! But if your photos are seen as large prints, or you are simply a stickler for detail, then you will be happy with the R5’s 45 megapixels. (Indeed, you might wish to wait for the rumoured even higher megapixel Canon 5S!)

Nightscapes, and indeed all landscape photos by day or by night, is where you will see the benefit of more megapixels. Finer details in the foreground show up better. Images are less pixelated. In test images with all three cameras, the R5 did provide sharper images to be sure. But you do have to zoom in a lot to appreciate the improvement.

Resolution — lunar imaging

**This compares blow-ups of images of the Moon taken through a 5-inch f/6 refractor (780mm focal length) with the R6 and R5.**

The Moon through a telescope is another good test of resolution. The above comparison shows how the R5’s smaller 4.4-micron pixels do provide much sharper details and less pixelation than the R6.

Of course, one could shoot at an even longer focal length to increase the “plate scale” with the R6. But at that same longer focal length the R5 will still provide better resolution, up to the point where its pixels are sampling more than what the atmospheric seeing conditions permit to be resolved. For lunar and planetary imaging, smaller pixels are always preferred, as they allow you to reach the seeing limit with shorter and often faster optical systems.

Resolution — deep sky

**This compares extreme blow-ups of images of the North America Nebula used for the other tests, shot with a 94mm f/4.5 refractor with the three cameras.**

On starfields, the difference is not so marked. As I showed in my review of the R6, with “only” 20 megapixels the R6 can still provide detailed deep-sky images.

However, in comparing the three cameras above, with images taken at a focal length of 420mm, the R5 does provide sharper stars, with faint stars better recorded, and with less blockiness (i.e. “square stars”) on all the star images. At that focal length the plate scale with the R5 is 2.1 arc seconds per pixel. With the R6 it is 3.2 arc seconds per pixel.

This is dim green Comet PanSTARRS C/2017 K2, at top, passing above the star clusters IC 4756 at lower left and NGC 6633 at lower right on May 25-26, 2022. This is a stack of ten 5-minute exposures with a William Optics RedCat 51 at f/4.9 and the Canon R5 at ISO 800.

The R5 is a good choice for shooting open and globular star clusters, or any small targets such as planetary nebulas, especially with shorter focal length telescopes. Bright targets will allow using lower ISOs, mitigating any of the R5’s extra noise.

With an 800mm focal length telescope, the plate scale with the R5 will be 1.1 arc seconds per pixel, about the limit most seeing conditions will permit resolving. With even longer focal length telescopes, the R5’s small pixels would be oversampling the image, with little gain in resolution, at least for deep-sky subjects. Lunar and planetary imaging can benefit from plate scales of 0.5 arc seconds per pixel or smaller.

CAN YOU CreatE resolution?

**This compares an original R6 image with the same image rescaled 200% in ON1 Resize AI and Topaz Gigapixel AI, and with those three compared to an original R5 image.**

Now, one can argue that today’s AI-driven scaling programs such as ON1 Resize AI and Topaz Gigapixel AI can do a remarkable job up-sizing images while enhancing and sharpening details. Why buy a higher-megapixel camera when you can just sharpen images from a lower-resolution model?

While these AI programs can work wonders on regular images, I’ve found their machine-learning seems to know little about stars, and can often create unwanted artifacts.

In scaling up an R6 image by 200%, ON1 Resize AI 2022 made a mess of the stars and sky background. Topaz Gigapixel AI did a much better job, leaving few artifacts. But using it to double the R6 image in pixel count still produced an image that does not look as sharp as an original R5 image, despite the latter having fewer pixels than the upsized R6 image.

Yes, we are definitely pixel-peeping! But I think this shows that it is better to have the pixels to begin with in the camera, and to not depend on software to generate sharpness and detail.

VIDEO Resolution

The R5’s 45-megapixel sensor also makes possible its headline selling point when it was released in 2020: 8K movie recording, with movies sized 8192 x 4320 (DCI standard) or 7680 x 4320 (UHD standard) at 29.97 frames per second, almost IMAX quality.

Where the R6’s major selling point for me was its low-light video capability, the R5’s 8K video prowess was less important. Or so I thought. With testing, I can see it will have its place in astrophotography, especially solar eclipses.

The R5 offers the options of 8K and 4K movies each in either the wider DCI Digital Cinema standard (8K-D and 4K-D) or more common Ultra-High Definition standard (8K-U and 4K-U), as well as conventional 1080 HD.

**This shows the Moon shot with the same 460mm-focal length telescope, with full-width frame grabs from movies shot in 8K, 4K, and 4K Movie Crop modes.**

Unlike the original Canon R and Rp, the R5 and R6 can shoot 4K movies sampled from the full width of their sensors, so there is no crop factor in the field of view recorded with any lens.

However, like the R6, the R5 also offers the option of a Movie Crop mode which samples a 4K movie from the central 4096 (4K-D) or 3840 (4K-U) pixels of the sensor. As I show above, this provides a “zoomed-in” image with no loss of resolution, useful when wide field of view is not so important as is zooming into small targets, such as for lunar and solar movies.

**This compares close-ups of frame grabs of the Moon movies shown in full-frame above, as well as a frame from an R6 movie, to compare resolutions.**

So what format produces the best resolution when shooting movies? As I show above, magnified frame grabs of the Moon demonstrate that shooting at 8K provides a much less pixelated and sharper result than either the 4K-Fine HQ (which creates a “High-Quality” 4K movie downsampled from 8K) or a standard 4K movie.

Shooting a 4K movie with the R6 also produced a similar result to the 4K movies from the R5. The slightly softer image in the R5’s 4K frame can, I think, be attributed more to atmospheric seeing.

Solar eclipse use

Shooting the highest resolution movies of the Moon will be of prime interest to astrophotographers when the Moon happens to be passing in front of the Sun!

That will happen along a narrow path that crosses North America on April 8, 2024. Capturing the rare total eclipse of the Sun in 8K video will be a goal of many. At the last total solar eclipse in North America, on August 21, 2017, I was able to shoot it in 4K by using a then state-of-the-art top-end Canon DSLR loaned to me by an IMAX movie production company!

And who knows, by 2024 we might have 100-megapixel cameras capable of shooting and recording the firehose of data from 12K video! But for now, even 8K can be a challenge.

**This compares the R5 at 8K with it in the best quality 4K Fine HQ vs. the R5 and R6 in their 4K Movie Crop modes.**

However, do you need to shoot 8K to get sharp Moon, Sun or eclipse movies? The above shows the 8K frame-grab compared to the R5’s best quality full-frame 4K Fine, and the R5’s and R6’s 4K Movie Crop mode that doesn’t resample or bin pixels from the larger sensor to create a 4K movie. The Cropped movies look only slightly softer than the R5 at 8K, with less pixelation than the 4K Fine HQ movie.

When shooting the Sun or Moon through a telescope or long telephoto lens, the wide field of a full-frame movie might not be required, even to take in the two- or three-degree-wide solar corona around the eclipsed Sun.

However, if a wide field for the maximum extent of the outer corona, combined with sharp resolution is the goal, then a camera like the Canon R5 capable of shooting 8K movies will be the ticket.

And 8K will be ideal for wide-angle movies of the passage of the Moon’s shadow during any eclipse, or for moderate fields showing the eclipsed Sun flanked by Jupiter and Venus on April 8, 2024.

Canon CLOG3

Like the R6, the R5 offers the option of shooting movies in Canon’s C-Log3 profile, which records internally in 10-bit, preserving more dynamic range in movies, up to 12 stops. The resulting movie looks flat, but when “colour graded” later in post, the movie records much more dynamic range, as I show above. Without C-Log3, the bright sunlit lunar crescent is blown out, as will be the Sun’s inner corona.

The bright crescent Moon with dim Earthshine is a good practice-run stand-in for the eclipsed Sun with its wide range of brightness from the inner to the outer corona.

Sample Moon Movies

For the full comparison of the R5 and R6 in my test shoot of the crescent Moon, see this narrated demo movie on Vimeo for the 4K movies, shot in various modes, both full-frame and cropped, with C-Log3 on and off.

Keep in mind that video compression in the on-line version may make it hard to see the resolution difference between shooting modes.

A “private link” 10-minute video on Vimeo demonstrating 4K video clips with the R5 and R6.

For a movie of the 8K footage, though downsized to 4K for the Vimeo version (the full sized 8K file was 29 Gigs!), see this sample movie below on Vimeo.

A “private link” video on Vimeo demonstrating 8K video clips with the R5.

LOw-Light VIDEO

Like the R6, the R5 can shoot at a dragged shutter speed as slow as 1/8-second. That slow shutter, combined with a fast f/1.4 to f/2 lens, and ISOs as high as 51,200 are the keys to shooting movies of the night sky.

Especially auroras. Only when auroras get shadow-casting bright can we shoot at the normal 1/30-second shutter speed of movies and at lower ISOs.

**This compares frame grabs of aurora movies shot the same night with the R5 at 8K and 4K with the Canon R6 at 4K, all at ISO 51,200.**

I was able to shoot a decent aurora one night from home with both the R5 and R6, and with the same fast TTArtisan 21mm f/1.5 RF lens. The sky and aurora changed in brightness from the time I shot with the R6 first to the R5 later. But even so, the movies serve as a look at how the two cameras perform for real-time aurora movies.

Auroras are where we need to shoot full-frame, for the maximum field of view, and at high ISOs. The R5’s maximum ISO is 51,200, while the R6 goes up to 204,800, though it is largely unusable at that speed for actual shooting, just for previewing scenes.

As expected, the R6 was much less noisy than the R5, by about two stops. The R5 is barely usable at ISO 51,200, while the R6 works respectably well at that speed. If auroras get very bright, then slower ISOs can be used, making the R5 a possible camera for low-light use, but it would not be a first choice, unless 8K auroras are a must-have.

Sample aurora Movies

For a narrated movie comparing the R5 and R6 at 4K on the aurora, stepping both through a range of ISO speeds, see this movie at Vimeo.

A “private link” video on Vimeo demonstrating 4K aurora clips with the R5 and R6.

For a movie showing the same aurora shot with the R5 at 8K, see this movie. However, it has been down-sized to 4K for on-line viewing, so you’ll see little difference between it and the 4K footage. Shooting at 8K did not improve or smooth noise performance.

A “private link” video on Vimeo demonstrating 8K aurora clips with the R5.

BATTERY LIFE — Stills and video

Canon’s new LP-E6NH battery supports charging through the USB-C port and has a higher 2130mAh capacity than the 1800mAh LP-E6 batteries. However, the R5 is compatible with the older batteries.

**Like the R6, the R5 comes with a new version of Canon’s standard LP-E6 battery, the LP-E6NH.**

On mild nights, I found the R5 ran fine on one battery for the 3 to 4 hours needed to shoot a time-lapse sequence, or set of deep-sky images, with power to spare. Now, that was with the camera in “Airplane Mode,” which I always use regardless, to turn off the power-consuming WiFi and Bluetooth, which I never use on cameras.

As I noted with the R6, for demanding applications, especially in winter, the R5 can be powered by an outboard USB power bank that has Power Delivery or “PD” capability.

The exception for battery use is when shooting videos, especially 8K. That can drain a battery after an hour of recording, though it takes only 10 to 12 minutes of 8K footage to fill a 128 gigabyte card. While less than half that length will be needed to capture any upcoming total eclipse from diamond ring to diamond ring, the result is still a massive file.

OVERHEATING

More critically, the R5 is also infamous for overheating and shutting down when shooting 8K movies, after a time that depends on how hot the environment is. I found the R5 shot 8K or 4K Fine HQ for about 22 minutes at room temperature before the overheat warning first came on, then shut off recording two or three minutes later. Movie recording cannot continue until the R5 cools off sufficiently, which takes at least 10 to 15 minutes.

That deficiency might befoul unwary eclipse photographers in 2024. The answer for “no-worry” 8K video recording is the Canon R5C, the video-centric version of the R5, with a built-in cooling fan.

Features and usability

While certainly not designed with astrophotography in mind, the R5 has several hardware and firmware features that are astrophoto friendly.

Like all Canon cameras made in the last few years, the R5 has Canon’s standard articulated screen, which can be angled up for convenient viewing when on a telescope. It is also a full touch screen, with all important camera settings and menus adjustable on screen, good for use at night.

With 2.1 million dots, the R5’s rear screen has a higher resolution than the 1.62-million-dot screen of the R6, and much higher than the 1 million pixels of the Rp’s screen, but is the same resolution as in the R and Ra.

**The R5’s top-mounted backlit LCD screen**

The R5, like the original R, has a top backlit LCD screen for display of current camera settings, battery level and Bulb timer. The lack of a top screen was one of my criticisms of the R6.

Yes, the hardware Mode dial of the R6 and Rp does make it easier to switch shooting modes, such as quickly changing from Stills to Movie. However, for astrophotography the top screen provides useful information during long exposures, and is handy to check when the camera is on a telescope or tripod aimed up to the sky, without spoiling dark adaptation. I prefer to have one.

**The R5’s front-mounted N3-style remote port**

The R5’s remote shutter port, used for connecting external intervalometers or time-lapse motion controllers, is Canon’s professional-grade three-pronged N3 connector. It’s sturdier than the 2.5mm mini-phono plug used by the Rp, R and R6. It’s a plus for the R5.

As with all new cameras, the R5’s USB port is a USB-C type. A USB-C cable is included.

**The R5’s back panel buttons and controls**

Like the R6, the R5 has a dedicated magnification button on the back panel for zooming in when manually focusing or inspecting images. In the R and Ra, that button is only on the touch panel rear screen, where it has to be called up by paging to that screen, an inconvenience. While virtual buttons on a screen are easier to see and operate at night than physical buttons, I find a real Zoom button handy as it’s always there.

**The R5’s twin cards, a CFexpress Type B and an SD UHS-II**

To handle the high data rates of 8K video and also 4K video when set to the high frame rate option of 120 fps, one of the R5’s memory card slots requires a CFexpress Type B card, a very fast but more costly format.

As I had no card reader for this format, I had to download movies via a USB cable directly from the camera to my computer, using Canon’s EOS Utility software, as Adobe Downloader out of Adobe Bridge refused to do the job. Plan to buy a card reader.

In the menus, you can choose to record video only to the CFexpress, and stills only to the SD card, or both stills and movies to each card for a backup, with the limitation that 8K and 4K 120fps won’t record to the SD card, even very fast ones.

FIRMWARE FEATURES

Unlike the Canon R and Ra (which both annoyingly lack a built-in intervalometer), but like the R6, the R5 has an Interval Timer in its firmware. This can be used to set up a time-lapse sequence, but with exposures only up to the maximum of 30 seconds allowed by the camera’s shutter speed settings, true of most in-camera intervalometers. Even so, this is a useful function for simple time-lapses.

As with most recent Canon DSLRs and DSLMs, the R5 also includes a built-in Bulb Timer. This allows setting an exposure of any length (many minutes or hours) when the camera is in Bulb mode. However, it cannot be combined with the Interval Timer for multiple exposures; it is good only for single shots. Nevertheless, I find it useful for shooting long exposures for the ground component of nightscape scenes.

While Canon cameras don’t have Custom Function buttons per se (unlike Sonys), the R5’s various buttons and dials can be custom programmed to functions other than their default assignments. I assign the * button to turning on and off the Focus Peaking display and, as shown, the AF Point button to a feature only available as a custom function, one that temporarily brightens the rear screen to full, good for quickly checking framing at night.

**Assigning Audio Memos to the Rate button**

A handy feature of the R5 is the ability to add an audio notation to images. You shoot the image, play it back, then use the Rate button (if so assigned) to record a voice memo of up to 30 seconds, handy for making notes in the field about an image or a shoot. The audio notes are saved as WAV files with the same file number as the image.

**The infamous Release Shutter Without Lens command**

Like other EOS R cameras, the R5 has this notorious “feature” that trips up every new user who attaches their Canon camera to a telescope or manual lens, only to find the shutter suddenly doesn’t work. The answer is to turn ON “Release Shutter w/o Lens” found buried under Custom Functions Menu 4. Problem solved!

OTHER FEATURES

I provide more details of other features and settings of the R5, many of which are common to the R6, in my review of the R6 here.

**Multi-segment panoramas with the R5, like this aurora scene, yield superb resolution but can become massive in size, pressing the ability of software and hardware to process them.**

CONCLUSION

No question, the Canon R5 is costly. Most buyers would need to have very good daytime uses to justify its purchase, with astrophotography a secondary purpose.

That said, other than low-light night sky videos, the R5 does work very well for all forms of astrophotography, providing a level of resolution that lesser cameras simply cannot.

Nevertheless, if it is just deep-sky imaging that is of interest, then you might be better served with a dedicated cooled-sensor CMOS camera, such as one of the popular ZWO models, and the various accessories that need to accompany such a camera.

But for me, when it came time to buy another premium camera, I still preferred to have a model that could be used easily, without computers, for many types of astro-images, particularly nightscapes, tracked wide-angle starfields, as well as telescopic images.

Since buying the R5, after first suspecting it would prove too noisy to be practical, it has in fact become my most used camera, at least for all images where the enhanced red sensitivity of the EOS Ra is not required. But for low-light night videos, the R6 is the winner.

However, to make use of the R5’s resolution, you do have to match it with sharp, high-quality lenses and telescope optics, and have the computing power to handle its large files, especially when stitching or stacking lots of them. The R5 can be just the start of a costly spending spree!

April 20, 2019July 12, 2019

Testing the Venus Optics 15mm Lens

Laowa Test Title

I test out a fast and very wide lens designed specifically for Sony mirrorless cameras.

In a previous test I presented results on how well the Sony a7III mirrorless camera performs for nightscape and deep-sky photography. It works very well indeed.

But what about lenses for the Sony? Here’s one ideal for astrophotography.

TL;DR Conclusions

Made for Sony e-mount cameras, the Venus Optics 15mm f/2 Laowa provides excellent on- and off-axis performance in a fast and compact lens ideal for nightscape, time-lapse, and wide-field tracked astrophotography with Sony mirrorless cameras. (UPDATE: Venus Optics has announced versions of this lens for Canon R and Nikon Z mount mirrorless cameras.)

I use it a lot and highly recommend it.

Size and Weight

While I often use the a7III with my Canon lenses by way of a Metabones adapter, the Sony really comes into its own when matched to a “native” lens made for the Sony e-mount. The selection of fast, wide lenses from Sony itself is limited, with the new Sony 24mm G-Master a popular favourite (I have yet to try it).

However, for much of my nightscape shooting, and certainly for auroras, I prefer lenses even wider than 24mm, and the faster the better.

Aurora over Båtsfjord, Norway. This is a single 0.8-second exposure at f/2 with the 15mm Venus Optics lens and Sony a7III at ISO 1600.

The Laowa 15mm f/2 from Venus Optics fills the bill very nicely, providing excellent speed in a compact lens. While wide, the Laowa is a rectilinear lens providing straight horizons even when aimed up, as shown above. This is not a fish-eye lens.

The Venus Optics 15mm realizes the potential of mirrorless cameras and their short flange distance that allows the design of fast, wide lenses without massive bulk.

While compact, at 600 grams the Laowa 15mm is quite hefty for its size due to its solid metal construction. Nevertheless, it is half the weight of the massive 1250-gram Sigma 14mm f/1.8 Art. The Laowa is not a plastic entry-level lens, nor is it cheap, at $850 from U.S. sources.

For me, the Sony-Laowa combination is my first choice for a lightweight travel camera for overseas aurora trips

However, this is a no-frills manual focus lens. Nor does it even transfer aperture data to the camera, which is a pity. There are no electrical connections between the lens and camera.

However, for nightscape work where all settings are adjusted manually, the Venus Optics 15mm works just fine. The key factor is how good are the optics. I’m happy to report that they are very good indeed.

Testing Under the Stars

To test the Venus Optics lens I shot “same night” images, all tracked, with the Sigma 14mm f/1.8 Art lens, at left, and the Rokinon 14mm SP (labeled as being f/2.4, at right). Both are much larger lenses, made for DSLRs, with bulbous front elements not able to accept filters. But they are both superb lenses. See my test report on these lenses published in 2018.

The next images show blow-ups of the same scene (the nightscape shown in full below, taken at Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta), and all taken on a tracker.

I used the Rokinon on the Sony a7III using the Metabones adapter which, unlike some brands of lens adapters, does not compromise the optical quality of the lens by shifting its focal position. But lacking a lens adapter for Nikon-to-Sony at the time of testing, I used the Nikon-mount Sigma lens on a Nikon D750, a DSLR camera with nearly identical sensor specs to the Sony.

Vignetting

Above is a tracked image (so the stars are not trailed, which would make it hard to tell aberrations from trails), taken wide open at f/2. No lens correction has been applied so the vignetting (the darkening of the frame corners) is as the lens provides.

As shown above, when used wide open at f/2 vignetting is significant, but not much more so than with competitive lenses with much larger lenses, as I compare below.

And the vignetting is correctable in processing. Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom have this lens in their lens profile database. That’s not the case with current versions (as of April 2019) of other raw developers such as DxO PhotoLab, ON1 Photo RAW, and Raw Therapee where vignetting corrections have to be dialled in manually by eye.

When stopped down to f/2.8 the Laowa “flattens” out a lot for vignetting and uniformity of frame illumination. Corner aberrations also improve but are still present. I show those in close-up detail below.

Above, I compare the vignetting of the three lenses, both wide open and when stopped down. Wide open, all the lenses, even the Sigma and Rokinon despite their large front elements, show quite a bit of drop off in illumination at the corners.

The Rokinon SP actually seems to be the worst of the trio, showing some residual vignetting even at f/2.8, while it is reduced significantly in the Laowa and Sigma lenses. Oddly, the Rokinon SP, even though it is labeled as f/2.4, seemed to open to f/2.2, at least as indicated by the aperture metadata.

On-Axis Performance

Above I show lens sharpness on-axis, both wide open and stopped down, to check for spherical and chromatic aberrations with the bright blue star Vega centered. The red box in the Navigator window at top right indicates what portion of the frame I am showing, at 200% magnification in Photoshop.

On-axis, the Venus Optics 15mm shows stars just as sharply as the premium Sigma and Rokinon lenses, with no sign of blurring spherical aberration nor coloured haloes from chromatic aberration.

Focusing is precise and easy to achieve with the Sony on Live View. My unit reaches sharpest focus on stars with the lens set just shy of the middle of the infinity symbol. This is consistent and allows me to preset focus just by dialing the focus ring, handy for shooting auroras at -35° C, when I prefer to minimize fussing with camera settings, thank you very much!

Off-Axis Performance

The Laowa and Sigma lenses show similar levels of off-axis coma and astigmatism, with the Laowa exhibiting slightly more lateral chromatic aberration than the Sigma. Both improve a lot when stopped down one stop, but aberrations are still present though to a lesser degree.

However, I find that the Laowa 15mm performs as well as the Sigma 14mm Art for star quality on- and off-axis. And that’s a high standard to match.

The Rokinon SP is the worst of the trio, showing significant elongation of off-axis star images (they look like lines aimed at the frame centre), likely due to astigmatism. With the 14mm SP, this aberration was still present at f/2.8, and was worse at the upper right corner than at the upper left corner, an indication to me that even the premium Rokinon SP lens exhibits slight lens de-centering, an issue users have often found with other Rokinon lenses.

Real-World Examples – The Milky Way

Mars and the Milky Way over Writing-on-Stone

The fast speed of the Laowa 15mm is ideal for shooting tracked wide-field images of the Milky Way, and untracked camera-on-tripod nightscapes and time-lapses of the Milky Way.

Image aberrations are very acceptable at f/2, a speed that allows shutter speed and ISO to be kept lower for minimal star trailing and noise while ensuring a well-exposed frame.

Real World Examples – Auroras

Coloured Curtains over CNSC (Feb 9, 2019)

Where the Laowa 15mm really shines is for auroras. On my trips to chase the Northern Lights I often take nothing but the Sony-Laowa pair, to keep weight and size down.

Above is an example, taken from a moving ship off the coast of Norway. The fast f/2 speed (I wish it were even faster!) makes it possible to capture the Lights in only 1- or 2-second exposures, albeit at ISO 6400. But the fast shutter speed is needed for minimizing ship movement.

Video Links

The Sony also excels at real-time 4K video, able to shoot at ISO 12,800 to 51,200 without excessive noise.

Aurora Reflections from Alan Dyer on Vimeo.

The Sky is Dancing from Alan Dyer on Vimeo.

The Northern Lights At Sea from Alan Dyer on Vimeo.

Examples of my aurora videos shot with the Sony and Venus Optics 15mm lens are in previous blogs from Yellowknife, NWT in September 2018, from Churchill, Manitoba in February 2019, and from at sea in Norway in March 2019.

Click through to see the posts and the videos shot with the Venus Optics 15mm.

As an aid to video use, the aperture ring of the Venus Optics 15mm can be “de-clicked” at the flick of a switch, allowing users to smoothly adjust the iris during shooting, avoiding audible clicks and jumps in brightness. That’s a very nice feature indeed.

In all, I can recommend the Venus Optics Laowa 15mm lens as a great match to Sony mirrorless cameras, for nightscape still and video shooting. UPDATE: Versions for Canon R and Nikon Z mount mirrorless cameras will now be available.

May 31, 2018March 27, 2021

Testing the Sony a7III for Astrophotography

Milky Way Rising at Dino Park

I put the new Sony a7III mirrorless camera through its paces for the features and functions we need to shoot the night sky.

Sony’s a7III camera has enjoyed rave reviews since its introduction earlier in 2018. Most tests focus on its superb auto exposure and auto focus capabilities that rival much more costly cameras, including Sony’s own a7rIII and a9.

For astrophotography, none of those auto functions are of any value. We shoot everything on manual. Indeed, the ease of manually focusing in Live View is a key function.

In my testing I compared the Sony a7III to two competitive DSLRs, the Canon 6D MkII and Nikon D750.

All three are “entry-level” full-frame cameras, with 24 to 26 megapixels and in a similar price league of $1,500 (Nikon) to 2,000 (Sony).

I tested a Sony a7III purchased locally. It was not supplied to me by Sony in return for an “influential” blog post.

I did this testing in preparation for the new third edition of my Nightscapes and Time-Lapse eBook, which includes information on Sony mirrorless cameras, as well as many, many other updates and additions!

NOTE: Click or Tap on most images to bring them up full-frame for inspection.

Milky Way Rising at Dino Park — **MILKY WAY AT DINOSAUR PARK** A stack of 2 x 90-second exposures for the ground, to smooth noise, and at f/2.8 for better depth of field, plus a single 30-second untracked exposure at f/2 for the sky. All with the Laowa 15mm lens and Sony a7III at ISO 3200.

Mirrorless vs. DSLR

Sony a7III with Loawa 15mm — **COMPACT CAMERA and LENS**
The Sony a7III with the compact but fast Laowa Venus Optics 15mm f/2 lens.

As with Sony’s other popular Alpha 7 and 9 series cameras, the new Alpha 7III is a full-frame mirrorless camera, a class of camera Canon and Nikon have yet to offer, though models are rumoured or promised.

In the meantime, Sony commands the full-frame mirrorless market.

As its name implies, a mirrorless camera lacks the reflex mirror of a digital single lens reflex camera that, in a DSLR, provides the light path for framing the scene though the optical viewfinder.

Sony Live View — **SONY LIVE VIEW**
The Sony a7III’s excellent Live View screen display. You can see the Milky Way!

In a mirrorless, the camera remains in “live view” all the time, with the sensor always feeding a live image to either or both the rear LCD screen and electronic viewfinder (EVF). While you can look through and frame using the EVF as you would with a DSLR, you are looking at an electronic image from the sensor, not an optical image from the lens.

The advantage of purely electronic viewing is that the image you are previewing matches the image you’ll capture, at least for short exposures. The disadvantage is that full-time live view draws more power, with mirrorless cameras notorious for being battery hungry.

Other mirrorless advantages include:

Compact size and lighter weight, yet offering all the image quality of a full-frame DSLR.
The thinner body allows the use of lenses from any manufacturer, albeit requiring the right adapter, an additional expense.
Lenses developed natively for mirrorless models can be smaller and lighter. An example is the Laowa 15mm f/2 I used for some of the testing.
The design lends itself to video shooting, with many mirrorless cameras offering 4K as standard, while often in DSLRs only high-end models do.
More rapid-fire burst modes and quieter shutters are a plus for action and wedding photographers, though they are of limited value for astrophotography.

Points of Comparison

Camera Trio-Sony, Nikon, Canon — **CAMERA TRIO**
The Sony a7III, Nikon D750, and Canon 6D Mark II. Note the size difference.

In testing the Sony a7III I ignored all the auto functions. Instead, I concentrated on those points I felt of most concern to astrophotographers, such as:

Noise levels
Effectiveness of Long Exposure Noise Reduction (LENR)
Quality of Raw files, such as sharpness of stars
Brightness of Live View for framing and focusing
Uniformity of sensor illumination
Compatibility for time-lapse imaging
Battery life

TL;DR Conclusions

Sony a7III and Meade 70mm — **DEEP-SKY TEST**
The North America Nebula with the Sony a7III and a Meade 70mm f/5 astrographic refractor, for a single 4-minute exposure at ISO 1600. The reds have been boosted in processing.

Noise
Levels of luminance and chrominance noise were excellent and similar to – but surprisingly not better than – the Nikon D750.

Star Eater
The Star Eater is effectively gone. Stars are not smoothed out in long exposures.

ISO Invariance
The Sony exhibited good – though not great – “ISO invariant” performance.

Dark Frames
Dark frame subtraction using Long Exposure Noise Reduction removed most – but not all – hot pixels from thermal noise.

Live View Focusing and Framing
Live View was absolutely superb, though the outstanding Bright Monitoring function is as well-hidden as Sony could possibly make it.

Sensor Illumination Uniformity
The Sony showed some slight edge-of-frame shadowing from the mask in front of the sensor, as well as a weak purple amp glow.

Features
• The a7III lacks any internal intervalometer or ability to add one via an app. But it is compatible with many external intervalometers and controllers.

• The a7III’s red sensitivity for recording H-Alpha-emitting nebulas was poor.

• It lacks the “light-frame” buffer offered by full-frame Canons that allows shooting several frames in quick succession even with LENR turned on.

Video Capability
The a7III offers 4K video and, at 24 frames-per-second, is full-frame. Shutter speeds can be as slow as 1/4-second, allowing real-time aurora shooting at reasonable ISO speeds.

Battery Life
Shooting typical 400-frame time-lapses used about 40% of the battery capacity, similar to the other DSLRs.

Overall Recommendations
The Sony a7III is a superb camera for still and time-lapse nightscape shooting, and excellent for real-time aurora videos. It is good, though not great, for long-exposure deep-sky imaging.

Liberty Schoolhouse with Star Trails — **STAR TRAILS and AURORA** With the Laowa 15mm lens and Sony a7III, for 155 exposures, all 20 seconds at f/2.8 and at ISO 800, and taken as part of a 360-frame time-lapse.

Noise

The Sony a7III uses a sensor that is “Backside Illuminated,” a feature that promises to improve low-light performance and reduce noise.

I saw no great benefit from the BSI sensor. Noise at typical astrophoto ISO speeds – 800 to 6400 – were about equal to the four-year-old Nikon D750.

That was a bit surprising. I expected the new BSI-equipped Sony to better the Nikon by about a stop. It did not. This emphasizes just how good the Nikon D750 is.

Nevertheless, noise performance of the Sony a7III was still excellent, with both the Sony and Nikon handily outperforming the Canon 6D MkII, with its slightly smaller pixels, by about a stop in noise levels.

NOTE: I performed all Raw developing with Adobe Camera Raw v10.3. It is possible some of the artifacts I saw are due to ACR not handling the a7III’s .ARW files as well as it should. But to develop all the images from Sony, Nikon, and Canon equally for comparisons, ACR is the best choice.

1-Sony vs Nikon vs Canon Noise — **COMPARING NOISE**
The Sony a7III exhibited noise levels similar to the Nikon D750 at high ISOs, with the Sony and Nikon each about a stop better for noise than the Canon 6D MkII.

2A-Sony vs Nikon vs Canon at 3200 — **NOISE AT ISO 3200**
At ISO 3200, a common nightscape ISO speed, all three cameras performed well in this moonlit scene. The Canon shows a darker sky as its images were taken a few minutes later. The Nikon had the Sigma 14mm Art lens; the Canon and Sony used the same Rokinon 14mm SP lens.

2B-Sony vs Nikon vs Canon at 6400 — **NOISE AT ISO 6400**
At ISO 6400, the Canon begins to show excessive noise, about a stop worse than the Nikon and Sony. No luminance noise reduction was applied to these images. All cameras show an equal number of stars recorded.

ISO Invariance

Both the Sony and Nikon use sensor and signal path designs that are “ISO invariant.” As a result, images shot underexposed at slower ISOs, then boosted in exposure later in processing look identical to properly exposed high-ISO images. Well, almost.

The Sony still showed some discoloration artifacts and added noise when boosting images by +4 EV that the Nikon did not. Even with uncompressed Raws, the Sony was not quite as ISO invariant as the Nikon, though the difference shows up only under extreme push-processing of badly underexposed frames.

Plus, the Sony was far better than the Canon 6D MkII’s “ISO variant” sensor. Canon really needs to improve their sensors to keep in the game.

3A-Sony vs Nikon vs Canon ISO Invariancy — **ISO INVARIANCE COMPARISON**
Here I shot all three cameras at ISO 6400 for a correct exposure for the scene, and also at ISO 1600 and ISO 400, for images 2 and 4 stops underexposed respectively. These were then boosted in Adobe Camera Raw by 2 and 4 stops in Exposure Value (EV) to compensate. With ISO invariant sensors the boosted images should look similar to the well-exposed image.

3B-Sony vs Nikon vs Canon ISO Invariancy CU — **ISO INVARIANCE CLOSE-UP**
A closeup of the scene shows the ISO variant Canon exhibited more noise and magenta discoloration in the +4 EV boosted image. The Nikon looks very clean, but the Sony also shows discoloration, green here, and an increase in noise. These are all uncompressed 14-bit Raw files.

4-Sony vs Nikon ISO Invariancy — **SONY vs. NIKON**
Comparing just the two ISO-invariant cameras, the Sony and the Nikon, on another night, shows a similar performance difference when boosting underexposed slow-ISO images later in Camera Raw. The Sony begins to show more noise and now a magenta discoloration in the +3 and +4 EV images, similar to, but not as badly as does the ISO-variant Canon 6D MkII.

Compressed vs. Uncompressed

The Sony a7III offers a choice of shooting Uncompressed or Compressed Raw files. Uncompressed Raws are 47 Mb in size; Compressed Raws are 24 Mb.

In well-exposed images, I saw little difference in image quality.

But the dark shadows in underexposed nightscapes withstood shadow recovery better in the uncompressed files. Compressed files showed more noise and magenta discoloration in the shadows.

It is not clear if Sony’s compressed Raws are 12-bit vs. 14-bit for uncompressed files.

Nevertheless, for the demands of nightscape and deep-sky shooting and processing, I suggest shooting Uncompressed Raws. Use Compressed only if you plan to take lots of time-lapse frames and need to conserve memory card space on extended shoots.

5A-Sony UnCompressed vs Compressed at -1EV — **UNCOMPRESSED vs. COMPRESSED**
Here I compare any image degradation from using compressed vs. uncompressed Raws, and from employing Long Exposure Noise Reduction. Images are only slightly underexposed and boosted by +1 EV in Camera Raw. Shadow noise is similar in all images, with the ones taken with LENR on showing elimination of colored hot pixels, as they should.

5B-Sony UnCompressed vs Compressed at -4EV — **UNCOMPRESSED vs. COMPRESSED at -4EV**
The same scene but now underexposed by 4 stops and boosted by +4 EV later shows greater differences. The compressed image shows more noise and discoloration, and the images taken with LENR on, while eliminating hot pixels, show more random luminance noise. Keep in mind, these are vastly underexposed images.

6-Sony Comp vs Uncomp + DF — **UNCOMPRESSED vs. COMPRESSED DEEP-SKY**
A real-world deep-sky example shows the same comparison. All images are well-exposed, for tracked and guided 4-minute exposures. The ones taken with LENR on show fewer hot pixels. The compressed images appear identical to the uncompressed files for noise and star content.

Star Eater (Updated March 27, 2021)

Over the last year or so, firmware updates from Sony introduced a much-publicized penchant for Sony Alphas to “eat” stars even in Raw files, apparently due to an internal noise reduction or anti-aliasing routine users could not turn off. Stars were smoothed away along with the noise in exposures longer than 3.2 seconds in some Sony cameras (longer than 30 seconds in others).

I feel that in the a7III the Star Eater has been largely vanquished.

While others beg to differ and claim this camera still eats stars, they offer no evidence of it other than graphs and charts, not A-B photos of actual tracked starfields taken with the Sony vs. another camera thought not to eat stars.

As the images below show, there is a very slight one-pixel-level softening that kicks in at 4 seconds and longer but it did not eat or wipe out stars. Stars are visible to the same limiting magnitude and close double stars are just as well resolved across all exposures. Indeed, at slower ISOs and longer exposures, more stars are visible.

I saw none of the extreme effects reported by others with other Sonys, where masses of faint stars disappeared or turned into multi-colored blotches. It is possible the effect is still present in other Sony Alpha models. I have not tested those.

But in the a7III, I did not see any significant “star eating” in any long exposures even up to the 4 minutes I used for some deep-sky shots. In images taken at the same time with other cameras not accused of star eating, the Sony showed just as many faint stars as the competitors. Stars were visible to just as faint a limiting magnitude, and that’s what counts, NOT graphs and charts, especially when such results are not shown for other cameras.

In short, long exposures showed just as many stars as did short exposures.

This was true whether I was shooting compressed or uncompressed Raws, with or without Long Exposure Noise Reduction. Neither compression nor LENR invoked “star eating.”

Sony-Star Eater Series @ 200% — **STAR EATER SERIES at 200%**
This series of tracked images (shown here blown up 200%) goes from 2 seconds to 2 minutes, with decreasing ISO speed to equalize the exposure value across the series. Between 3.2s and 4s a very slight one-pixel-level softening does kick in, reducing noise and very slightly blurring stars. Yet, just as many stars are recorded and are resolved, and at the lower ISOs/longer exposures more stars are visible because faint stars are not lost in the noise.

Sony-Star Eater Series @ 400% — **STAR EATER SERIES at 400%**
This is the same series as above but now blown up 400% to better reveal the very subtle change in pixel-level sharpness as exposure lengthened from 3.2 to 4 seconds. Noise (most noticeable in the trees) is reduced and stars are very slightly softened. But none are “eaten” or wiped out. And star colors are not affected, though very small stars are sometimes green, an effect seen in other cameras due to de-Bayering artifacts.

7A-Sony vs Canon for Star Eater v1 — **STAR EATER DEEP-SKY #1**
Tracked deep-sky images through a telescope using 4-minute exposures show the Sony a7III recording an equal number of faint stars as the Canon 6D MkII. No luminance noise reduction was applied to these images in processing.

7B-Sony vs Canon for Star Eater v2 — **STAR EATER DEEP-SKY #2**
Another example with 4-minute exposures again demonstrates no problems recording faint stars. The Canon does show more noise than the Sony. No noise reduction was applied in processing.

7C-Sony vs Nikon for Star Eater — **SONY and NIKON COMPARED**
For yet more evidence, this is a comparison of the Sony a7III vs. the Nikon D750 in tracked 90-second exposures with 14mm lenses. Again, the Sony records just as many stars as the Nikon.

LENR Dark frames

For elimination of hot pixels from thermal noise I prefer to use Long Exposure Noise Reduction when possible for nightscape and deep-sky images, especially on warm summer nights.

Exceptions are images taken for star trail stacking and for time-lapses, images that must be taken in quick succession, with minimal time gap between frames.

Turning on LENR did eliminate most hot pixels in long exposures, but not all. A few remained. Also, when boosting the exposure a lot in processing, the images taken with LENR on showed more shot and read noise than non-LENR frames.

The dark frame the camera was taking and subtracting was actually adding some noise, perhaps due to a temperature difference. The cause is not clear.

Sony advises that when using LENR Raw images are recorded with only 12-bit depth, not 14-bit. This might be a contributing factor. Yet frames taken with LENR on were the same 47 Mb size as normal uncompressed frames.

For those who think this is normal for LENR use, the Nikon D750 shows nothing like this – frames taken with LENR on are free of all hot pixels and do not show more shot or read noise, nor deterioration of shadow detail from lower bit depths.

However, I emphasize that the noise increase from using LENR with the Sony was visible only when severely boosting underexposed images in processing.

In most shooting situations, I found using LENR provided the overriding positive benefit of reducing hot pixels. It just needs to be better, Sony!

8A-Sony Dark Frames (W and WO LENR) — **SONY WITH AND WITHOUT LENR**
These are 4-minute exposures of dark frames (i.e. the lens cap on!) taken at room temperature with and without Long Exposure Noise Reduction. In the Sony, LENR did not eliminate all hot pixels nor the magenta amp glow at the left edge. LENR also added a background level of fine noise. These have had exposure and contrast increased to exaggerate the differences.

8B-Nikon Dark Frames (W and WO LENR) — **NIKON WITH AND WITHOUT LENR**
Dark frames taken with the Nikon D750 under the same circumstances and processed the same show none of the residual hot pixels and added background noise when LENR is employed. Nor is there any amp glow anywhere along the frame edges.

8C-Sony With and Without LENR — **SONY REAL-WORLD LENR COMPARISON**
A real-world example with the Sony, with a properly exposed nightscape, shows that the ill effects of using LENR don’t show up under normal processing. You do get the benefit of reduced hot pixels in shadows, especially on a warm night like this was. This is a blow-up of the lower corner of the frame, as indicated.

Sensor Illumination

How evenly an image is illuminated is a common factor when testing lenses.

But astrophotography, which often requires extreme contrast boosts, reveals non-uniform illumination of the sensor itself, regardless of the optics, originating from hardware elements in front of the sensor casting shadows onto the sensor.

This is most noticeable – indeed usually only noticeable – when shooting deep-sky targets though telescopes.

With DSLRs it is the raised mirror which often casts a shadow, produced a dark vignetted band along the bottom of the frame. Its extent varies from camera model to model.

With a mirrorless camera the sensor is not set far back in a mirror box, as it is in a DSLR. As such, I would have expected a more uniformly illuminated sensor.

Sony a7III - Sensor CU — **SENSOR CLOSE-UP** showing intruding mask edges.

Instead, I saw a slight shadowing at the top and bottom edges but just at the corners. This is from a thin metal mask in front of the sensor. It intrudes into the light path ever so slightly. It shouldn’t.

This is an annoying flaw, though applying “flat fields” or ad hoc local adjustments should eliminate this. But that’s a nuisance to do, and should not be necessary with a mirrorless camera.

Worse is that long deep-sky exposures at high ISOs also exhibited a faint purple glow at the left edge, perhaps from heat from nearby electronics, a so-called “amp glow.” Or I’ve read where this is from an internal infrared source near the sensor.

Taking a dark frame with LENR did not eliminate this, and it should, demonstrating again that for whatever reason in the a7III LENR is not as effective as it should be.

I have not seen such “amp” glows in cameras (at least in the DSLRs I’ve used) for a number of years, so seeing it in the new Sony a7III was another surprise.

This would be much tougher to eliminate in deep-sky images where the extreme contrast boosts we typically apply to images of nebulas and galaxies will accentuate any odd glows.

UPDATE: March 27, 2021 — Subsequent firmware updates seem to have eliminated this amp glow. One supplier of filter-modified cameras, Spencer’s Camera, who had refused to modify Sonys because of this glow, now lists many Sony Alphas as suitable for modification. However, the sensor masks and “green stars” (described below) still make the Sony a7III less desirable for deep-sky imaging than other mirrorless cameras I’ve tested.

9A-Sony Full Field — **SONY FIELD ILLUMINATION #1**
The full field of a deep-sky image taken through an f/5 70mm astrographic refractor shows the minor level of edge darkening at the corners from shadowing of the sensor in the Sony.

New Sony Blog Example — **SONY FIELD ILLUMINATION #2** The full field of a deep-sky image taken through an f/6 105mm refractor shows the level of edge darkening at the edges from shadowing of the sensor in the Sony, and the purple “amplifier” glow at the left edge present in all very long exposures.

Red Sensitivity

When shooting deep-sky objects, particularly red nebulas, we like a camera to have a less aggressive infrared cutoff filter, to pick up as much of the deep red Hydrogen-Alpha emission line as possible.

The Sony showed poor deep-red sensitivity, though not unlike other cameras. It was a little worse than the stock Canon 6D MkII.

This isn’t a huge detriment, as anyone who really wants to go after deep nebulosity must use a “filter-modified” camera anyway.

Canon and Nikon both offered factory modified cameras at one time, notably the Canon 60Da and Nikon D810a. Sony doesn’t have an “a” model mirrorless.

To get the most out of the Sony for deep-sky imaging you would have to have it modified by a third-party, though the amp glow described above makes it a poor choice for modification.

10-Canon5D vs 6D vs Sony (Red Nebula) — **RED SENSITIVITY COMPARED**
Three deep-sky exposures compare cameras for red sensitivity: a filter-modified Canon 5D MkII, a stock Canon 6D MkII, and the stock Sony a7III. As expected the filter-modified camera picks up much more red nebulosity. The Sony doesn’t do quite as well as the Canon 6D MkII.

Live View Focusing and Framing

Up to now my report on the Sony a7III hasn’t shown as glowing a performance as all the YouTube reviews would have you believe.

But Live Focus is where the a7III really stands out. I love it!

In Live View it is possible to make the image so bright you can actually see the Milky Way live on screen! Wow! This makes it so easy to frame nightscapes and deep-sky fields.

Sony-Custom Buttoms — **FINDING BRIGHT MONITORING**
The excellent Bright Monitoring function is accessible only off the Custom Key menu where it appears as a choice on the Display/Auto Review2 page (below) that can be assigned to a C button.

But this special “Bright Monitoring” mode is as well hidden as Sony could make it. Unless you actually read the full-length 642-page PDF manual (you have to download it), you won’t know about it. Bright Monitoring does not appear in any of the in-camera menus you can scroll through, so you won’t stumble across it.

Instead, you have to go to the Camera Settings 2 page, then select Still Image–Custom Key. In the menu options that appear you can now scroll to one called Bright Monitoring. Surprise! Assign it to one of the hardware Custom C buttons. I put it on C2, making it easy to call up when needed.

The other Live View function that works well, but also needs assigning to a C button is the Camera Settings 1 > Focus Magnifier. I put this on C1. It magnifies the Live View by 5.9x or 11.7x, allowing for precise manual focusing on a star.

Two other functions are useful for Live View:

Camera Settings 2 > Live View Display > Setting Effect ON. This allows the Live View image to reflect the camera settings in use, better simulating the actual exposure, even without Bright Monitoring on.

Camera Settings 1 > Peaking Setting. Turning this ON superimposes a shimmering effect on parts of an image judged in focus. This might be an aid, or an annoyance. Try it.

In all, the Sony provides superb, if well-hidden, Live View options that make accurately framing and focusing a nightscape or time-lapse scene a joy.

Great Features for Astrophotography

Here are some other Sony a7III features I found of value for astrophotography, and for operating the camera at night.

Sony a7III with Tilt Screen — **SONY TILTING SCREEN** It tilts up and down but does not flip out as with the Canon 6D MkII’s. Still, this is a neck- and back-saving feature for astrophotography.

Tilting LCD Screen
Like the Nikon D750, the Sony’s screen tilts vertically up and down, great for use when on a telescope, or on any tripod when aimed up at the sky. As photographers age, this becomes a more essential feature!

Custom Buttons
The four C buttons can be programmed for oft-used functions, making them easy to access at night. Standard functions such as ISO and Drive Mode are easy to get at on the thumb wheel, unlike the Nikon D750 where I am forever hunting for the ISO or Focus Zoom buttons, or the Canon 6D MkII which successfully hides the Focus Zoom and Playback buttons at night.

My Menu
In new models, Sony now offers the option of a final “My Menu” page which you can populate with often-used functions from the other 35 pages of menu commands!

Adaptability to Many Lenses
Using the right lens adapter (I use one from Metabones), it is possible to use lenses with mounts made for Canon, Nikon, Sigma and others. Plus there are an increasing number of lenses from third parties offered with native Sony E-mounts. This is good news, as astrophotography requires fast, high-quality lenses, and the Sony allows more choices.

Lighter Weight / Smaller Size
The compact a7III body weighs a measured 750 grams, vs. 900 grams each for the Nikon D750 and Canon 6D MkII. The lower weight can be helpful for use on lightweight telescopes, on small motion control devices, and for simply keeping weight and bulk down when traveling.

Dual Card Slots
Not essential, but having two card slots is very helpful, for backup, for handling overflows from very long time-lapse shoots, or assigning them for stills vs. movies, or Raws vs. JPGs. Only Slot 1 will work with the fastest UHS II cards that are needed for recording the highest quality 4K video.

USB Power
It is possible to power the camera though the USB port (indeed that’s how you charge the battery, as no separate battery charger is supplied as standard, a deficiency). This might be useful for long shoots, though likely as not that same USB port will be needed for an intervalometer or motion control device. But if the Sony had a built-in intervalometer…!

Display Options
To reduce battery drain it is possible to turn off the EVF completely – I find I never use it at night – and to turn off the LCD display when shooting, though the latter is an option you have to activate to add to the Display button’s various modes.

The downside is that when shooting is underway you get no reassuring indication anything is happening, except for a brief LED flash when an image is written to a card.

Electronic Front Curtain Shutter
Most DSLRs do not offer this, but the Sony’s option of an electronic front curtain shutter and the additional Silent Shooting mode completely eliminates vibration, useful for some high-magnification shooting through telephotos and telescopes.

11-Sony Shutter Vibration — **LUNAR CLOSE-UPS COMPARED**
This trio compares closeups of the Moon taken with and without electronic front curtain shutter. All were taken through a 130mm refractor telescope at f/12 using a Barlow lens. The image with e-shutter and in Silent Mode is a tad sharper, but that could be just as much from variations in seeing conditions as from the lower vibration from using the electronic shutter.

What’s Missing for Astrophotography

Intervalometer — NOW INCLUDED!
UPDATE: In April 2019 Sony issued a v3 Firmware update for the a7III which added an internal intervalometer. I’ve used this new function and it works very well.

I had originally remarked that this useful function was missing. But no more! Thank you Sony!

While a built-in intervalometer is not essential, I find I often do use the Canon and Nikon in-camera intervalometers for simple shoots. So it is great to have one available on the Sony. However, like other brands’ internal intervalometers Sony’s is good only for exposures up to 30 seconds long.

Bulb Timer or Long Exposures
However, while the Sony has a Bulb setting there is no Bulb Timer as there is with the Canon. The Bulb Timer would allow setting long Bulb exposures of any length in the camera.

Instead, for any exposures over 30 seconds long (or time-lapses with >30-second-long frames) the Sony must be used with an external Intervalometer. I use a $50 Vello unit, and it works very well. It controls the Sony through the camera’s Multi USB port.

In-Camera Image Stacking
Also missing, and present on most new Canons, are Multiple Exposure modes for in-camera stacking of exposures in a Brighten mode (for star trails) or Averaging mode (for noise smoothing).

Yes, this can all be done later in processing, but having the camera do the stacking can often be convenient, and great for beginners, as long as they understand what those functions do, or even that they exist!

Time-Lapse Smoothing
When using its internal intervalometer, the Nikon D750 has an excellent Exposure Smoothing option. This does a fine job smoothing frame-to-frame flickering in time-lapses, something the Canon cannot do. Nor the Sony, as it has no intervalometer at all.

Light Frame Buffer in LENR
This feature is little known and utilized, and only Canon full-frame cameras offer it. Turn on LENR and it is possible to shoot three (with the 6D MkII) or four (with the 6D) Raw images in quick succession even with LENR turned on. The Canon 5D series also has this.

The dark frame kicks in and locks up the camera only after the series of “light frames” are taken. This is wonderful for taking a set of noise-reduced deep-sky images for later stacking. Nikons don’t have this, not even the D810a, and not Sonys.

Illuminated Buttons
The Sony’s buttons are not illuminated. While these might add glows to long exposure images, if they could be designed not to do that (i.e. they turn off during exposures), lit buttons would be very handy at night.

Limited Touch Screen Functions
An alternative would be an LCD screen that was touch sensitive. The Sony a7III’s screen is, but only to select an area for auto focus or zooming up an image in playback. The Canon 6D MkII has a fully functional touch screen which can be, quite literally, handy at night.

Sony a7III with Vello Intervalometer — **INTERVALOMETER**
For time-lapses, the Sony must be used with an external intervalometer like this Vello unit.

Video Capability

Here’s another area where the new Sony a7III really shines.

It offers 4K (or more precisely UltraHD) video recording for videos of 3840 x 2160 pixels. (True 4K is actually 4096 x 2160 pixels.)

With a fast enough UHS-II Class card it can record 4K video up to 30 frames per second and at a bit rate of either 60 or 100 Mbps.

At 24 fps videos are full-frame with no cropping. Hurray! You can take full advantage of wide-angle lenses, great for auroras. At 30 fps, 4K videos are cropped with a 1.2x crop factor.

In Movie Mode ISO speeds go up to ISO 102,400, but are pretty noisy, if unusable at such speeds.

But when shooting aurora videos I found, to my surprise, I could “drag” the shutter speeds as slow as 1/4-second, fully 4 stops better than the Nikon’s slowest shutter speed of 1/60 second in Full HD, and 3 stops better than the Canon’s slowest movie shutter of 1/30 second.

Coupled with a fast f/1.4 to f/2 lens, the slow shutter speed allows real-time aurora shooting at “only” ISO 6400 to 12,800, for quite acceptable levels of noise. I am very impressed!

Real-time video of auroras is not possible with anything like this quality with the Nikon (I’ve used it often), and absolutely not with the Canon. And neither are 4K.

Is the a7III as good for low-light video as the Sony a7s models, with their larger 8.5-micron pixels?

I would assume not, but not having an a7s (either Mark I or II) to test I can’t say for sure. But the a7III should do the job for bright auroras, the ones with rapid motion worth recording with video, plus offer 24 megapixels for high-quality stills of all sky subjects.

I think it’s a great camera for both astrophoto stills and video.

12A-Aurora Video Screen Shot — **AURORA VIDEO FRAME**
This is a frame grab from a real-time 4K video of a “Steve” aurora.

An example is in a 4K video I shot on May 6, 2018 of an usual aurora known as “STEVE.”

Steve Aurora – May 6, 2018 (4K) from Alan Dyer on Vimeo.

For another example of using the Sony a7III for recording real-time video of the night sky see this video of the aurora shot from Norway in March 2019.

The Northern Lights At Sea from Alan Dyer on Vimeo.

Battery Life

I found the a7III would use up about about 40% of the battery capacity in a typical 400-frame time-lapse on mild spring nights, with 30-second exposures. This is with the EVF and rear LCD Display OFF, and the camera in Airplane mode to turn off wireless functions to further conserve battery power. I was using the wired Vello intervalometer.

This is excellent performance on par with the DSLRs I use. At last, we have a mirrorless camera that not only doesn’t eat stars, it also does not eat batteries!

One battery can get you through a night of shooting, though performance will inevitably decline in winter, as with all cameras.

Planets Along the Ecliptic — **MILKY WAY and PLANETS** With the Sony a7III and Laowa 15mm lens at f/2 for a stack of 4 exposures for the ground to smooth noise and one exposure for the sky, all 30 seconds at ISO 3200.

Lens and Telescope Compatibility

As versatile as a mirrorless camera is for lens choice, making use of that versatility requires buying the right lens adapter(s). They can cost anywhere from $100 to $400. The lowest cost units just adapt the lens mechanically; the more costly units also transfer lens data and allow auto focusing with varying degrees of compatibility.

Sony a7III with MetaBones — **WITH METABONES CANON ADAPTER**
The MetaBones Canon EF-to-Sony E mount adapter transfers lens data and allows auto focus to function.

For use on telescopes, the simple adapters will be sufficient, and necessary as many telescope-to-camera adapters and field flatteners are optimized for the longer lens flange-to-sensor distance of a DSLR. Even if you could get a mirrorless camera to focus without a lens adapter to add the extra spacing, the image quality across the field might be compromised on many telescopes.

I used the Metabones Canon-to-Sony adapter when attaching the Sony to my telescopes using my existing Canon telescope adapters. Image quality was just fine.

Sony a7III with Telescope Adapter — **ADAPTING TO A TELESCOPE**
The MetaBones adapter, as will other brands, adds the correct lens flange to sensor distance for telescope field flatteners to work best.

Time-Lapse Controller Compatibility

Due to limitations set by Sony, controlling one of their cameras with an external controller can be problematic.

Devices that trigger only the shutter should be fine. That includes simple intervalometers like the Vello, the Syrp Genie Mini panning unit, and the Dynamic Perception and Rhino sliders, to name devices I use. However, all will need the right camera control cable, available from suppliers like B&H.

And, as I found, the Sony might need to be placed into Continuous shooting mode to have the shutter fire with every trigger pulse from the motion controller. When used with the Genie Mini (below) the Sony fired at only every other pulse if it was in Single shot mode, an oddity of Sony’s firmware.

Some time-lapse controllers are able to connect to a camera through its USB port and then adjust the ISO and aperture as well, for ramped “holy grail” sunset-to-Milky Way sequences.

For example, the TimeLapse+ View (see http://www.timelapseplus.com) works great for automated holy grails, but the developer recommends that with most Sonys the minimum allowed interval between shots is longer (8 to 14 seconds) than with Canons and Nikons. See http://docs.view.tl/#camera-specific-notes

With the Alpine Laboratories Radian2, exposure ramping is not possible with a Sony, only basic shutter triggering. See https://alpinelaboratories.com/pages/radian-2-support-get-started_s

Sony a7III on Genie Mini — **SONY WITH THE SYRP GENIE MINI**
The Sony A7III worked well with the Syrp Genie Mini motion controller with the right shutter cable but only when placed in Continuous mode.

Recommendations

In conclusion, here’s my summary recommendations for the three competitive cameras, rating them from Poor, to Fair, to Good, to Excellent.

SONY: I deducted marks from the Sony a7III for deep-sky imaging for its lack of a light frame buffer, poor red sensitivity, odd LENR performance, and purple amp glow not seen on the other cameras and that dark frames did not eliminate.

However, I did not consider “star eating” to be a negative factor, as the Sony showed just as many stars and as well-resolved as did the competitors, and what more could you ask for?

I rate the Sony excellent for nightscape imaging and for real-time aurora videos. I list it as just “good” for time-lapse work only because it will not be fully compatible with some motion controllers and rampers. So beware!

NIKON: I deducted points for real-time video of auroras – the D750 can do them but is pretty noisy with the high ISOs needed. Its red sensitivity is not bad, but its lack of a light frame buffer results a less productive imaging cycle when using LENR on deep-sky shooting.

I know … people shoot dark frames separately for subtracting later in processing. However, I’ve found these post-shoot darks rarely work well, as the dark frames are not at the same temperature as the light frames, and often add noise or dark holes.

CANON: The 6D MkII’s lack of an ISO invariant sensor rears its ugly head in underexposed shadows in dark-sky nightscapes. I like its image stacking options, which can help alleviate the noise and artifacts in still images, but aren’t practical for time-lapses. Thus my Good rating for nightscapes but Fair rating for time-lapses. (See my test at https://amazingsky.net/2017/08/09/testing-the-canon-6d-mark-ii-for-nightscapes/)

While the 6D MkII has HD video, it is incapable of any low-light video work.

But … when well exposed, such as in tracked deep-sky images, the 6D MkII performs well. (See my test at https://amazingsky.net/2017/09/07/testing-the-canon-6d-mkii-for-deep-sky/)

And its light-frame buffer is great for minimizing shooting time for a series of deep-sky images with in-camera LENR dark frames, which I find are the best for minimizing thermal noise. Give me a Canon full-frame any day for prime-focus deep-sky shooting.

It’s just a pity the 6D MkII has only a 3-frame buffer when using LENR. Really Canon? The 2008-vintage 5D MkII had a 5-frame buffer! Your cameras are getting worse for astrophotography while Sony’s are getting better.

	SONY a7III	NIKON D750	CANON 6D Mk II
Nightscapes	Excellent	Excellent	Good
Time-Lapse	Good	Excellent	Fair
Real-Time Video (Auroras)	Excellent	Fair	Poor
Wide-field Deep Sky	Good	Good	Excellent
Telescopic Deep Sky	Fair	Good	Excellent

I trust you’ll find the review of value. Thanks for reading!

ADDENDUM as of JUNE 6, 2018

Since publishing the first results a number of people commented with suggestions for further testing, to check claims that:

The Sony would perform better for noise under dark sky conditions, at high ISOs, rather than the moonlit scene above. OK, let’s try that.
The Sony would perform better in an ISO Invariancy “face-off” if its ISOs were kept above 640, to keep all the images within the Sony’s upper ISO range of its dual-gain sensor design, with two ranges (100 to 400, and 640 on up). Fair enough.
What little “star-eater” effect I saw might be mitigated by shooting on Continuous drive mode or by firing the shutter with an external timer. That’s worth a check, too.

For the additional tests, I shot all images within a 3-hour span on the night of June 5/6, using the Sony a7III, Nikon D750, and Canon 6D MkII, with the respective lenses: the Laowa 15mm lens at f/2, the Sigma 14mm Art at f/2, and the Rokinon 14mm SP at f/2.5.

The cameras were on a Star Adventurer Mini tracker to keep stars pinpoints, though the ground blurred in the longer exposures.

DARK SKY NOISE TEST

I show only the Sony and Nikon compared here, shot at the common range of ISOs used for nightscape shooting, 800 to 12800. All images are equally well exposed. The inset image at right in Photoshop shows the scene, the Milky Way above dark trees in my backyard!

To the eye, the Sony and Nikon look very similar for noise levels, just as in the moonlit scene. Both are very good – indeed, among the best performing cameras for high-ISO noise levels. But the Sony, being four years newer than the Nikon, is not better.

BUT … what the Sony did exhibit was better details in the shadows than the Nikon.

And this was with equal processing and no application of Shadow Recovery. This is where the Sony’s Backside Illuminated sensor with presumably higher quantum efficiency in gathering photons might be providing the advantage. With its good shadow details, you have to apply less shadow recovery in post-processing, which does keep noise down. So points to Sony here.

Sony vs Nikon High ISO Noise (Dark Sky) — **SONY vs NIKON HIGH ISO under DARK SKIES**
Noise levels appeared visually similar but the Sony showed more shadow details. Excellent!

I did put all the high ISO images through the classic noise reduction program Noise Ninja to measure total Luminance and Chrominance noise, and included the Canon 6D MkII’s images.

The resulting values and graph show the Sony actually measured worse for noise than the Nikon at each high ISO speed, 3200 to 12800, though with both performing much better than the Canon.

The higher noise of the Canon is visually obvious, but I’d say the Sony a7III and Nikon D750 are pretty equal visually for noise, despite the numbers.

Noise Ninja Value Graph — COMPARING NOISE WITH NOISE NINJA

DARK SKY ISO INVARIANCY

Again, here I show only the Sony and Nikon, the two “ISO invariant” cameras. The correct exposure for the scene was 30 seconds at ISO 6400 and f/2. The images shown here were shot at lower ISOs to underexposure the dark scene by 2 to 4 stops or EV. Those underexposed images were then boosted later in processing (in Adobe Camera Raw) by the required Exposure Value to equalize the image brightness.

Contrary to expectations, the Sony did not show any great loss in image quality as it crossed the ISO 640 boundary into its lower ISO range. But the Nikon did show more image artifacts in the “odd-numbered” ISOs of 640 and 500. In this test, the Nikon did not perform as well as the Sony for ISO invariancy. Go figure!

Again, the differences are in images vastly underexposed. And both cameras performed much better than the ISO “variant” Canon in this test.

Sony vs Nikon ISO Invariancy (Dark Sky) — **DARK SKY ISO INVARIANCY**
Here the Sony a7III performed well and better than the Nikon D750.

STAR EATER REVISITED

I shot images over a wide-range of exposures, from 2 seconds to 2 minutes, but show only the ones covering the 2-second to 4-second range, where the “star-eater” anti-aliasing or noise smoothing applied by Sony kicks in (above 3.2 seconds it seems).

I shot with the Sony a7III on Single shot drive mode, on Continuous Low drive mode (with the camera controlling the shutter speed in both cases), and a set with the Sony on Bulb and the shutter speed set by an external Vello intervalometer.

This is really pixel peeping at 400%. In Single drive mode, stars and noise soften ever so slightly at 4 seconds and higher. In Continuous mode, I think the effect is still there but maybe a little less. In shots on Bulb controlled by the External Timer, maybe the stars at 4 seconds are a little sharper still. But this is a tough call. To me, the star eater effect on the Sony a7III is a non-issue. It may be more serious on other Sony alphas.

Sony Star Eater-Shutter Control Series — **STAR EATING vs DRIVE MODE**
This series shows star sharpness in images taken in Single and Continuous drive modes, and in Externally Timed exposures.

DE-BAYERING STAR ARTIFACTS

An issue that, to me, has a more serious effect on star quality is the propensity of the Sony, and to some extent the Nikon, to render tiny stars as brightly colored points, unrealistically so. In particular, many stars look green, from the dominance of green-filtered photosites on Bayer-array sensors.

Here I compare all three cameras for this effect in two-minute tracked exposures taken with Long Exposure Noise Reduction (i.e. in-camera dark frame subtraction) off and on.

The Sony shows a lot of green stars with or without LENR. The Nikon seems to discolor stars only when LENR is applied. Why would that be? The Canon is free of any such issue – stars are naturally colored whether LENR dark frames are applied or not.

This is all with Raws developed with Adobe Camera Raw.

When opening the same Raws in other programs (ON1 Photo RAW, Affinity Photo, DxO PhotoLab, and Raw Therapee) the results can be quite different, with stars often rendered with fringes of hot, colored pixels. Or rendered with little or no color at all. Raw Therapee offers a choice of de-Bayering, or “de-mosaic,” routines, and each produces different looking stars, and none look great! Certainly not as good as the Canon rendered with Camera Raw.

What’s going on here is a mystery – it’s a combination of the cameras’ unique Raw file formats, anti-alias filter in front of the sensor (or lack thereof in the Sony), and the de-Bayering routines of all the many Raw developers wrestling with the task of rendering stars that occupy only a few pixels. It’s unfair to blame just the hardware or the software.

But this test re-emphasized my thoughts that Canon DSLRs remain the best for long-exposure deep-sky imaging where you can give images as much exposure time as they need, while the ISO invariant Sony and Nikons exceed at nightscape shooting where exposures are often limited and plagued by dark shadows and noise.

Sony vs Nikon vs Canon-LENR Off and On — **COLORED STARS COMPARISON**
The Sony shows a propensity to render small stars in many vivid and unreal colors. The Nikon can do so after LENR is applied. The Canon is more neutral and natural.

So the pixel-peeping continues!

I hope you found these latest tests of interest.

December 6, 2017December 29, 2017

Testing 10 Photoshop Contenders

1-Comparing Raw Developers (Wide)

To Adobe or not to Adobe. That is the question many photographers are asking with the spate of new image processing programs vying to “kill Photoshop.”

I tested more than ten contenders as alternatives to Adobe’s image processing software, evaluating them ONLY for the specialized task of editing demanding nightscape images taken under the Milky Way, both for single still images and for time-lapses of the moving sky. I did not test these programs for other more “normal” types of images.

Also, please keep in mind, I am a Mac user and tested only programs available for MacOS, though many are also available for Windows. I’ve indicated these.

But I did not test any Windows-only programs. So sorry, fans of Paintshop Pro (though see my note at the end), Photoline, Picture Window Pro, or Xara Photo & Graphic Designer. They’re not here. Even so, I think you will find there’s plenty to pick from!

This review expands upon and updates mini-reviews I included in my Nightscapes and Time-Lapses eBook, shown at right.

If you are hoping there’s a clear winner in the battle against Adobe, one program I can say does it all and for less cost and commitment, I didn’t find one.

Group of 9 (small)

However, a number of contenders offer excellent features and might replace at least one member of Adobe’s image processing suite.

For example, only four of these programs can truly serve as a layer-based editing program replacing Photoshop.

The others are better described as Adobe Lightroom competitors – programs that can catalog image libraries and develop raw image files, with some offering adjustment layers for correcting color, contrast, etc. But as with Lightroom, layering of images – to stack, composite, and mask them – is beyond their ability.

For processing time-lapse sequences, however, we don’t need, nor can we use, the ability to layer and mask several images into one composite.

What we need for time-lapses is to:

Develop a single key raw file, then …
Copy its settings to the hundreds of other raw files in the time-lapse set, then …
Export that folder of raw images to “intermediate JPGs” for assembly into a movie.

Even so, not all these contenders are up to the task.

Here are the image processing programs I looked at. Costs are in U.S. dollars. Most have free trial copies available.

The Champion from Adobe

Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), Photoshop, Bridge, and Lightroom, the standards to measure others by

Cost: $10 a month by subscription, includes ACR, Photoshop, Bridge, and Lightroom

Website: https://www.adobe.com

OS: Windows and Mac

Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) is the raw development plug-in that comes with Photoshop and Adobe Bridge, Adobe’s image browsing application that accompanies Photoshop. Camera Raw is equivalent to the Develop module in Lightroom, Adobe’s cataloguing and raw processing software. Camera Raw and Lightroom have identical processing functions and can produce identical results.

Photoshop and Lightroom complement each other and are now available together, but only by monthly subscription through Adobe’s Creative Cloud service, at $10/month. Though $120 for a year is not far off the cost of purchasing many of these other programs and perhaps upgrading them annually, many photographers prefer to purchase their software and not subscribe to it.

Thus the popularity of these alternative programs. Most offered major updates in late 2017.

My question is, how well do they work? Are any serious contenders to replace Photoshop or Lightroom?

Lightroom Contenders: Five Raw Developers

ACDSee Photo Studio (current as of late 2017)

Cost: $60 to $100, depending on version, upgrades $40 to $60.

Website: http://www.acdsystems.com

OS: Windows and Mac

I tested the single MacOS version. Windows users have a choice of either a Standard or Professional version. Only the Pro version offers the full suite of raw development features, in addition to cataloging functions. The MacOS version resembles the Windows Pro version.

Capture One v11 (late 2017 release)

Cost: $299, and $120 for major upgrades, or by subscription for $180/year

Website: https://www.phaseone.com

OS: Windows and Mac

As of version 11 this powerful raw developer and cataloguing program offers “Layers.” But these are only for applying local adjustments to masked areas of an image. You cannot layer different images. So Capture One cannot be used like Photoshop, to stack and composite images. It is a Lightroom replacement only, but a very good one indeed.

Corel Aftershot Pro v3 (late 2017)

Cost: $80, and $60 for upgrades

Website: http://www.aftershotpro.com/en/

OS: Windows, Mac, and Linux

Here’s a low cost Lightroom replacement for image management and raw processing abilities. Noise reduction is “Perfectly Clear” from Athentech and works well.

DxO PhotoLab ELITE v1 (late 2017)

Cost: $199

Website: http://www.dxo.com/us/photography/photo-software/dxo-photolab

OS: Windows and Mac

The ELITE version of what DxO now calls “PhotoLab” offers DxO’s superb PRIME noise reduction and excellent ClearView contrast enhancement feature. While it has an image browser, PhotoLab does not create a catalog, so this isn’t a full Lightroom replacement, but it is a superb raw developer. DxO also recently acquired the excellent Nik Collection of image processing plug-ins, so we can expect some interesting additions and features.

Raw Therapee v5.3 (mid-2017 release)

Cost: Free

Website: http://rawtherapee.com

OS: Windows, Mac, and Linux

This free open source program has been created and is supported by a loyal community of programmers. It offers a bewildering blizzard of panels and controls, among them the ability to apply dark frames and flat field images, features unique among any raw developer and aimed specifically at astrophotographers. Yes, it’s free, but the learning curve is precipitous.

Photoshop Contenders: Four Raw Developers with Layering/Compositing

These programs can not only develop at least single raw images, if not many, but also offer some degree of image layering, compositing, and masking like Photoshop.

However, only ON1 Photo RAW can do that and also catalog/browse images as Lightroom can. Neither Affinity, Luminar, or Pixelmator offer a library catalog like Lightroom, nor even a file browsing function such as Adobe Bridge, serious deficiencies I feel.

Affinity Photo v1.6 (late 2017)

Cost: $50

Website: https://affinity.serif.com

OS: Windows and Mac

This is the lowest cost raw developer and layer-based program on offer here, and has some impressive features, such as stacking images, HDR blending, and panorama stitching. However, it lacks any library or cataloguing function, so this is not a Lightroom replacement, but it could replace Photoshop.

Luminar 2018

Cost: $80, and $40 for major upgrades

Website: https://macphun.com

OS: Windows and Mac

Macphun has changed their name to Skylum and now makes their fine Luminar program for both Mac and Windows. While adding special effects is its forte, Luminar does work well both as a raw developer and layer-based editor. But like Affinity, it has no cataloguing feature. It cannot replace Lightroom.

ON1 Photo RAW 2018

Cost: $120, and $100 for major upgrades

Website: https://www.on1.com

OS: Windows and Mac

Of all the contenders tested here, this is the only program that can truly replace both Lightroom and Photoshop, in that ON1 has cataloguing, raw developing, and image layering and masking abilities. In fact, ON1 allows you to migrate your Lightroom catalog into its format. However, ON1’s cost to buy and maintain is similar to Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photo subscription plan. It’s just that ON1’s license is “perpetual.”

NOTE: Windows users might find Corel’s Paintshop Pro 2018 a good “do-it-all” solution – I tested only Corel’s raw developer program Aftershot Pro, which Paintshop Pro uses.

Pixelmator Pro v1 (late 2017 release)

Cost: $60

Website: http://www.pixelmator.com/pro/

OS: MacOS only

The “Pro” version of Pixelmator was introduced in November 2017. It has an innovative interface and many fine features, and it allows layering and masking of multiple images. However, it lacks some of the key functions (listed below) needed for nightscape and time-lapse work. Touted as a Photoshop replacement, it isn’t there yet.

The Challenge

This is the image I threw at all the programs, a 2-minute exposure of the Milky Way taken at Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in southern Alberta in late July 2017.

NOTE: Click/tap on any of the screen shots to bring them up full screen so you can inspect and save them.

2-ACR Original Undeveloped — Original Raw Image Out of the Camera, BEFORE Development

The lens was the Sigma 20mm Art lens at f/2 and the camera the Nikon D750 at ISO 1600.

The camera was on a tracking unit (a Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Mini) to keep stars pinpoints.

Thus the ground is blurred. Keep that in mind, as it will always look fuzzy in the comparison images. But it does show up noise well, including hot pixels. This image of the sky is designed to be composited with one taken without the tracker turning, to keep the ground sharp.

3-ACR Developed (Wide) — Raw Image AFTER Development in Adobe Camera Raw

Above is the image after development in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), using sliders under its Basic, Tone Curve, Detail, HSL, Lens Corrections, and Effects tabs. Plus I added a “local adjustment” gradient to darken the sky at the top of the frame. I judged programs on how well they could match or beat this result.

4-Adobe Lightroom — Same Image Developed in Adobe Lightroom

Above is the same image developed in Adobe Lightroom, to demonstrate how it can achieve identical results to Camera Raw, because at heart it is Camera Raw.

Feature Focus

I have assumed a workflow that starts with raw image files from the camera, not JPGs, for high-quality results.

And I have assumed the goal of making that raw image look as good as possible at the raw stage, before it goes to Photoshop or some other bit-mapped editor. That’s an essential workflow for time-lapse shooting, if not still-image nightscapes.

However, I made no attempt to evaluate all these programs for a wide range of photo applications. That would be a monumental task!

Nor, in the few programs capable of the task, did I test image layering. My focus was on developing a raw image. As such, I did not test the popular free program GIMP, as it does not open raw files. GIMP users must turn to one of the raw developers here as a first stage.

If you are curious how a program might perform for your purposes and on your photos, then why not test drive a trial copy?

Instead, my focus was on these programs’ abilities to produce great looking results when processing one type of image: my typical Milky Way nightscape, below.

TIFF from DxO into Photoshop — TIFF Exported from DxO PhotoLab … then Imported into Photoshop

Such an image is a challenge because…

The subject is inherently low in contrast, with the sky often much brighter than the ground. The sky needs much more contrast applied, but without blocking up the shadows in the ground.
The sky is often plagued by off-color tints from artificial and natural sky glows.
The ground is dark, perhaps lit only by starlight. Bringing out landscape details requires excellent shadow recovery.
Key to success is superb noise reduction. Images are shot at high ISOs and are rife with noise in the shadows. We need to reduce noise without losing stars or sharpness in the landscape.

I focused on being able to make one image look as good as possible as a raw file, before bringing it into Photoshop or a layer-based editor – though that’s where it will usually end up, for stacking and compositing, as per the final result shown at the end.

I then looked at each program’s ability to transfer that one key image’s settings over to what could be hundreds of other images taken that night, either for stacking into star trails or for assembling into a time-lapse movie.

Summary Conclusions

1-Comparing Raw Developers (Wide) — Results of 8 Programs compared to ACR (at left)

None of the programs I tested ticked all the boxes in providing all the functions and image quality of the Adobe products.

But here’s a summary of my recommendations:

For Advanced Time-Lapse

Photoshop+Bridge+Lightroom+LRT

None of the non-Adobe programs will work with the third-party software LRTimelapse (www.lrtimelapse.com). It is an essential tool for advanced time-lapse processing. LRTimelapse works with Lightroom or ACR/Bridge to gradually shift processing settings over a sequence, and smooth annoying image flickering.

If serious and professional time-lapse shooting is your goal, none of the Adobe contenders will work. Period. Subscribe to Creative Cloud. And buy LRTimelapse.

For Basic Time-Lapse

Group of 5 for Time-Lapse

However, for less-demanding time-lapse shooting, when the same settings can be applied to all the images in a sequence, then I feel the best non-Adobe choices are, in alphabetical order:

ACDSee
Capture One
Corel Aftershot Pro
DxO PhotoLab
ON1 Photo RAW

… With, in my opinion, DxO and Capture One having the edge for image quality and features. But all five have a Library or Browser mode with easy-to-use Copy & Paste and Batch Export functions needed for time-lapse preparation.

Also worth a try is PhotoDirector9 (MacOS and Windows), a good Lightroom replacement. Scroll to the end for more details and a link.

For Still Image Nightscapes

Group of 3 for Still Images

If you are processing just individual still images, perhaps needing only to stack or composite a few exposures, and want to do all the raw development and subsequent layering of images within one non-Adobe program, then look at (again alphabetically):

Affinity Photo
Luminar 2018
ON1 Photo RAW 2018

… With Affinity Photo having the edge in offering a readily-available function off its File menu for stacking images, either for noise smoothing (Mean) or creating star trails (Maximum).

However, I found its raw development module did not produce as good a result as most competitors due to Affinity’s poorer noise reduction and less effective shadow and highlight controls. Using Affinity’s “Develop Persona” module, I could not make my test image look as good as with other programs.

Luminar 2018 has better noise reduction but it demands more manual work to stack and blend images.

While ON1 Photo Raw has some fine features and good masking tools, it exhibits odd de-Bayering artifacts, giving images a cross-hatched appearance at the pixel-peeping level. Sky backgrounds just aren’t smooth, even after noise reduction.

To go into more detail, these are the key factors I used to compare programs.

Noise Reduction

Absolutely essential is effective noise reduction, of luminance noise and chrominance color speckles and splotches.

Ideally, programs should also have a function for suppressing bright “hot” pixels and dark “dead” pixels.

Here’s what I consider to be the “gold standard” for noise reduction, Adobe Camera Raw’s result using the latest processing engine in ACR v10/Photoshop CC 2018.

5A-ACR (Close-Up) — BEFORE and AFTER Noise Reduction with Adobe Camera Raw (ACR)

I judged other programs on their ability to produce results as good as this, if not better, using their noise reduction sliders. Some programs did better than others in providing smooth, noiseless skies and ground, while retaining detail.

5B-DxO Noise Reduction — BEFORE and AFTER Noise Reduction and Other Adjustments with DxO PhotoLab

For example, one of the best was DxO PhotoLab, above. It has excellent options for reducing noise without being overwhelming in its choices, the case with a couple of other programs. For example, DxO has a mostly effective dead/hot pixel removal slider.

ACR does apply such a hot pixel removal “under the hood” as a default, but often still leaves many glaring hot specks that must be fixed later in Photoshop.

Comparing Noise Reduction

6-Comparing Raw Developers (CU) — 300% Close-Ups to Compare Noise Reduction

Above are 8 of the contender programs compared to Camera Raw for noise reduction.

Missing from this group is the brand new Pixelmator Pro, for MacOS only. It does not yet have any noise reduction in its v1 release, a serious deficiency in imaging software marketed as “Pro.” For that reason alone, I cannot recommend it. I describe its other deficiencies below.

Lens Corrections

The wide-angle lenses we typically use in nightscape and time-lapse imaging suffer from vignetting and lens distortions. Having software that can automatically detect the lens used and apply bespoke corrections is wonderful.

8B-Capture One Lens Correction — Lens Corrections in Capture One

Only a few programs, such as Capture One (above), have a library of camera and lens data to draw upon to apply accurate corrections with one click. With others you have to dial in corrections manually by eye, which is crude and inaccurate.

Shadows and Highlights

All programs have exposure and contrast adjustments, but the key to making a Milky Way nightscape look good is being able to boost the shadows (the dark ground) while preventing the sky from becoming overly bright, yet while still applying good contrast to the sky.

Of the contenders, I liked DxO PhotoLab best (shown above), not only for its good shadow and highlight recovery, but also excellent “Smart Lighting” and “ClearView” functions which served as effective clarity and dehaze controls to snap up the otherwise low-contrast sky. With most other programs it was tough to boost the shadows without also flattening the contrast.

On the other hand, Capture One’s excellent layering and local adjustments did make it easier to brush in adjustments just to the sky or ground.

However, any local adjustments like those will be feasible only for still images or time-lapses where the camera does not move. In any motion control sequences the horizon will be shifting from frame to frame, making precise masking impractical over a sequence of hundreds of images.

Therefore, I didn’t place too much weight on the presence of good local adjustments. But they are nice to have. Capture One, DxO PhotoLab, and ON1 win here.

Selective Color Adjustments

All programs allow tweaking the white balance and overall tint.

But it’s beneficial to also adjust individual colors selectively, to enhance red nebulas, enhance or suppress green airglow, bring out green grass, or suppress yellow or orange light pollution.

Some programs have an HSL panel (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) or an equalizer-style control for boosting or dialing back specific colors.

8A-Capture One Color Adjustments — Color Adjustments in Capture One

Capture One (above) has the most control over color correction, with an impressive array of color wheels and sliders that can be set to tweak a broad or narrow range of colors.

And yet, despite this, I was still unable to make my test image look quite the way I wanted for color balance. ACR and DxO PhotoLab still won out for the best looking final result.

Copy and Paste Settings

Even when shooting nightscape stills we often take several images to stack later. It’s desirable to be able to process just one image, then copy and paste its settings to all the others in one fell swoop. And then to be able to inspect those images in thumbnails to be sure they all look good.

Some programs (Affinity Photo, Luminar, Pixelmator Pro) lack any library function for viewing or browsing a folder of thumbnail images. Yes, you can export a bunch of images with your settings applied as a user preset, but that’s not nearly as good as actually seeing those images displayed in a Browser mode.

9A-ON1 Photo RAW Copy & Paste — Copy and Paste Settings in ON1 Photo RAW

What’s ideal is a function such as ON1 Photo RAW displays here, and that some other programs have: the ability to inspect a folder of images, work on one, then copy and paste its settings to all the others in the set.

This is absolutely essential for time-lapse work, and nice to have even when working on a small set to be stacked into a still image.

Batch Export

Once you develop a folder of raw images with “Copy and Paste,” you now have to export them with all those settings “baked into” the exported files.

This step is to create an intermediate set of JPGs to assemble into a movie. Or perhaps to stack into a star trail composite using third party software such as StarStaX, or to work on the images in another layer-based program of your choice.

9B-ON1 Photo RAW Batch Export — Batch Export in ON1 Photo RAW

As ON1 Photo RAW shows above, this is best done using a Library or Browser mode to visually select the images, then call up an Export panel or menu to choose the image size, format, quality, and location for the exports.

Click Export and go for coffee – or a leisurely dinner – while the program works through your folder. All programs took an hour or more to export hundreds of images.

Design

Those functions were the key features I looked for when evaluating the programs for nightscape and time-lapse work.

Every program had other attractive features, often ones I wished were in Adobe Camera Raw. But if the program lacked any of the above features, I judged it unsuitable.

Yes, the new contenders to the Photoshop crown have the benefit of starting from a blank slate for interface design.

26-Luminar Interface — Luminar 2018’s Clean User Interface

Many, such as Luminar 2018 above, have a clean, attractive design, with less reliance on menus than Photoshop.

Photoshop has grown haphazardly over 25 years, resulting in complex menus. Just finding key functions can take many tutorial courses!

But Adobe dares to “improve” Photoshop’s design and menu structure at its peril, as Photoshop fans would scream if any menus they know and love were to be reorganized!

The new mobile-oriented Lightroom CC is Adobe’s chance to start afresh with a new interface.

Summary Table of Key Features

Comparison Table — Click or tap to view and save full screen version.

Fair = Feature is present but doesn’t work as easily or produce as good a result

Partial = Program has lens correction but failed to fully apply settings automatically / DxO has a Browse function but not Cataloging

Manual = Program has only a manually-applied lens correction

– = Program is missing that feature altogether

Program-by-Program Results

Group of 9 (small)

I could end the review here, but I feel it’s important to present the evidence, in the form of screen shots of all the programs, showing both the whole image, and a close-up to show the all-important noise reduction.

ACDSee Photo Studio

PROS: This capable cataloging program has good selective color and highlight/shadow recovery, and pretty smooth noise reduction. It can copy and paste settings and batch export images, for time-lapses. It is certainly affordable, making it a low-cost Lightroom contender.

CONS: It lacks any gradient or local adjustments, or even spot removal brushes. Lens corrections are just manual. There is no dehaze control, which can be useful for snapping up even clear night skies. You cannot layer images to create composites or image stacks. This is not a Photoshop replacement.

Affinity Photo

PROS: Affinity supports image layers, masking with precise selection tools, non-destructive “live” filters (like Photoshop’s Smart Filters), and many other Photoshop-like functions. It has a command for image stacking with a choice of stack modes for averaging and adding images.

It’s a very powerful but low cost alternative to Photoshop, but not Lightroom. It works fine when restricted to working on just a handful of images.

CONS: Affinity has no lens correction database, and I found it hard to snap up contrast in the sky and ground without washing them out, or having them block up. Raw noise reduction was acceptable but not up to the best for smoothness. It produced a blocky appearance. There are no selective color adjustments.

Nor is there any library or browse function. You can batch export images, but only through an unfriendly dialog box that lists images only by file name – you cannot see them. Nor can you copy and paste settings visually, but only apply a user-defined “macro” to develop images en masse upon export.

This is not a program for time-lapse work.

Capture One 11

13A-Capture One Pro (Wide) — Capture One 11 Full Screen

13B-Capture One Pro (CU) — Capture One 11 Enlargement

PROS: With version 11 Capture One became one of the most powerful raw developers, using multiple layers to allow brushing in local adjustments, a far better method than Adobe Camera Raw’s local adjustment “pins.” It can create a catalog from imported images, or images can be opened directly for quick editing. Its noise reduction was good, with hot pixel removal lacking in Camera Raw.

Its color correction options were many!

It can batch export images. And it can export files in the raw DNG format, though in tests only Adobe Camera Raw was able to read the DNG file with settings more or less intact.

CONS: It’s costly to purchase, and more expensive than Creative Cloud to subscribe to. Despite all its options I could never quite get as good looking an image using Capture One, compared to DxO PhotoLab for example.

It is just a Lightroom replacement; it can’t layer images.

Corel Aftershot Pro 3

12A-Aftershot Pro (Wide) — Corel Aftershot Pro Full Screen

12B-Aftershot Pro (CU) — Corel Aftershot Pro Enlargement

PROS: This low-cost option has good noise reduction using Athentech’s Perfectly Clear process, with good hot pixel or “impulse” noise removal. It has good selective color and offers adjustment layers for brushing in local corrections. And its library mode can be used to copy and paste settings and batch export images.

Again, it’s solely a Lightroom alternative.

CONS: While it has a database of lenses, and identified my lens, it failed to apply any automatic corrections. Its shadow and highlight recovery never produced a satisfactory image with good contrast. Its local adjustment brush is very basic, with no edge detection.

DxO PhotoLab

PROS: I found DxO produced the best looking image, better perhaps than Camera Raw, because of its DxO ClearView and Smart Lighting options. It has downloadable camera and lens modules for automatic lens corrections. Its noise reduction was excellent, with its PRIME option producing by far the best results of all the programs, better perhaps than Camera Raw, plus with hot pixel suppression.

DxO has good selective color adjustments, and its copy and paste and batch export work fine.

CONS: There are no adjustment layers as such. Local adjustments and repairing are done through the unique U-Point interface which works something like ACR’s “pins,” but isn’t as visually intuitive as masks and layers. Plus, DxO is just a raw developer; there is no image layering or compositing. Nor does it create a catalog as such.

So it is not a full replacement for either Lightroom or Photoshop. But it does produce great looking raw files for export (even as raw DNGs) to other programs.

Luminar 2018

PROS: Luminar has good selective color adjustments, a dehaze control, and good contrast adjustments for highlights, mid-tones, and shadows. Adjustments can be added in layers, making them easier to edit. Noise reduction was smooth and artifact-free, but adjustments were basic. Many filters can be painted on locally with a brush, or with a radial or gradient mask.

CONS: It has no lens correction database; all adjustments are manual. The preview was slow to refresh and display results when adjusting filters. The interface is clean but always requires adding filters to the filter panel to use them when creating new layers. Its batch export is crude, with only a dialog box and no visual browser to inspect or select images.

Settings are applied as a user preset on export, not through a visual copy-and-paste function. I don’t consider that method practical for time-lapses.

ON1 Photo RAW 2018

16A-ON1 Photo Raw (Wide) — ON1 Photo RAW Full Screen

16B-ON1 Photo Raw (CU) — ON1 Photo RAW Enlargement

PROS: ON1 is the only program of the bunch that can: catalog images, develop raw files, and then layer and stack images, performing all that Lightroom and Photoshop can do. It is fast to render previews in its “Fast” mode, but in its “Accurate” mode ON1 is no faster than Lightroom. It has good layering and masking functions, both in its Develop mode and in its Photoshop-like Layers mode.

Selective color and contrast adjustments were good, as was noise reduction. Developing, then exporting a time-lapse set worked very well, but still took as long as with Lightroom or Photoshop.

CONS: Despite promising automatic lens detection and correction, ON1 failed to apply any vignetting correction for my 20mm Sigma lens. Stars exhibited dark haloes, even with no sharpening, dehaze, or noise reduction applied. Its de-Bayering algorithm produced a cross-hatched pattern at the pixel level, an effect not seen on other programs.

Noise reduction did not smooth this. Thus, image quality simply wasn’t as good.

Pixelmator Pro

PROS: It is low cost. And it has an attractive interface.

CONS: As of version 1 released in November 2017 Pixelmator Pro lacks: any noise reduction (it’s on their list to add!), any library mode or copy and paste function, nor even the ability to open several images at once displayed together.

It is simply not a contender for “Photoshop killer” for any photo application, despite what click-bait “reviews” promise, ones that only re-write press releases and don’t actually test the product.

Raw Therapee v5.3

18A-Raw Therapee (Wide) — Raw Therapee Full Screen

18B-Raw Therapee (CU) — Raw Therapee Enlargement – With and Without Noise Reduction

PROS: It’s free! It offers an immense number of controls and sliders. You can even change the debayering method. It detects and applies lens corrections (though in my case only distortion, not vignetting). It has good selective color with equalizer-style sliders. It has acceptable (sort of!) noise reduction and sharpening with a choice of methods, and with hot and dead pixel removal.

It can load and apply dark frames and flat fields, the only raw developer software that can. This is immensely useful for deep-sky photography.

CONS: It offers an immense number of controls and sliders! Too many! It is open source software by committee, with no one in charge of design or user friendliness. Yes, there is documentation, but it, too, is a lot to wade through to understand, especially with its broken English translations. This is software for digital signal processing geeks.

But worst of all, as shown above, its noise reduction left lots of noisy patches in shadows, no matter what combination of settings I applied. Despite all its hundreds of sliders, results just didn’t look as good.

What About …? (updated December 28)

What About Group of 8

No matter how many programs I found to test, someone always asks, “What about …?” In some cases such comments pointed me to programs I wasn’t even aware of, but subsequently tried out. So here are even more to pick from…

Acorn (https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/)

Billed as having “everything you need in an image editor,” this low-cost ($30) MacOS-only program is anything but. Its raw developer module is crude and lacks any of the sophisticated range of adjustments offered by all the other programs on offer here. It might be useful as a layer-based editor of images developed by another program.

Alien Skin Exposure x3 (https://www.alienskin.com)

Alien Skin (Wide) — Alien Skin Exposure x3 at work on the the image

Available for Mac and Windows for $150, this Lightroom competitor offers a good browser function, with the ability to “copy-from-one and paste-to-many” images (unlike some of the programs below), and a good batch export function for time-lapse work. It has good selective color controls and very good noise reduction providing a smooth background without artifacts like blockiness or haloes. Local adjustments, either through brushed-on adjustments or through gradients, are applied via handy and easy to understand (I think!) layers.

While it has auto lens corrections, its database seemed limited — it did not have my Sigma 20mm lens despite it being on the market for 18 months. Manual vignetting correction produced a poor result with just a washed out look.

The main issue was that its shadow, highlight, and clarity adjustments just did not produce the snap and contrast I was looking for, but that other programs could add to raw files. Still, it looks promising, and is worth a try with the trial copy. You might find you like it. I did not. For similar cost, other programs did a better job, notably DxO PhotoLab.

darktable (http://www.darktable.org)

In the same ilk as Raw Therapee, I also tested out another free, open-source raw developer, one simply called “darktable,” with v2.2.5 shown below. While it has some nice functions and produced a decent result, it took a lot of time and work to use.

The MacOS version I tried (on a brand new 5K iMac) ran so sluggishly, taking so long to re-render screen previews, that I judged it impractical to use. Sliders were slow to move and when I made any adjustments often many seconds would pass before I would see the result. Pretty frustrating, even for free.

Iridient Developer (http://www.iridientdigital.com)

19B-Iridient Developer — Iridient Developer

A similar crowd-developed raw processing program, Iridient Developer (above), sells for $99 US. I tested a trial copy of v3.2. While it worked OK, I was never able to produce a great looking image with it. It had no redeeming features over the competition that made its price worthwhile.

Paintshop Pro (https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/)

PaintShop Raw Developer — Paintshop Pro’s included but very basic Raw developer.

Using Parallels running Windows 10 on my Mac, I did try out this popular Windows-only program from Corel. By itself, Paintshop Pro’s raw developer module (shown above) is basic, crude and hardly up to the tax of processing demanding raw files. You are prompted to purchase Corel’s Aftershot Pro for more capable raw development, and I would agree – Aftershot would be an essential addition. However …

As I showed above, I did test the MacOS version of Aftershot Pro on my raw sample image, and found it did the poorest job of making my raw test image look good. Keep in mind that it is the ability of all these programs to develop this typical raw nightscape image that I am primarily testing.

That said, given a well-developed raw file, Paintshop Pro can do much more with it, such as further layering of images and applying non-destructive and masked adjustment layers, as per Photoshop. Indeed, it is sold as a low-cost (~ $60) Photoshop replacement. As such, many Windows users find Paintshop’s features very attractive. However, Paintshop lacks the non-destructive “smart” filters, and the more advanced selection and masking options offered by Photoshop, Affinity Photo, and ON1 Photo Raw. If you have never used these, you likely don’t realize what you are missing.

If it’s an Adobe alternative you are after, I would suggest Windows users would be better served by other options. Why not test drive Affinity and ON1?

PhotoDirector 9 (https://www.cyberlink.com/products/photodirector-ultra/features_en_US.html)

Photo Director Wide — PhotoDirector’s very Lightroom-like interface and controls.

This was a surprising find. Little known, certainly to me, this Windows and MacOS program from the Taiwanese company Cyberlink, is best described as a Lightroom substitute, but it’s a good one. Its regular list price is $170. I bought it on sale for $60.

Like Lightroom, working on any images with PhotoDirector requires importing them into a catalog. You cannot just browse to the images. Fine. But one thing some people complain about with Lightroom is the need to always import images.

I was impressed with how good a job PhotoDirector did on my raw test image. PhotoDirector has excellent controls for shadow and highlight recovery, HSL selective color, copying-and-pasting settings, and batch exporting. So it will work well for basic time-lapse processing.

Noise reduction was very good and artifact-free. While it does have automatic lens corrections, its database did not include the 2-year old Sigma 20mm Art lens I used. So it appears its lens data is not updated frequently.

PhotoDirector has good local adjustments and gradients using “pins” rather than layers, similar to Camera Raw and Lightroom.

After performing raw image “Adjustments,” you can take an image into an Edit module (for adding special effects), then into a Layers module for further work. However, doing so destructively “flattens” the image to apply the raw adjustments you made. You cannot go back and tweak the raw settings in the Adjustment module, as you can when opening a raw file as a “smart object” in Adobe Photoshop.

While PhotoDirector does allow you to layer in other images to make basic composites (such as adding type or logos), there is no masking function nor any non-destructive adjustment layers. So this is most assuredly not a Photoshop substitute, despite what the advertising might suggest. But if it’s a Lightroom replacement you are after, do check it out in a trial copy.

Picktorial v3 (https://www.picktorial.com)

This little-known MacOS-only program (only $40 on sale) for developing raw images looks very attractive, with good selective color, lots of local adjustments, and good masking tools, the features promoted on the website. It does have a browse function and can batch export a set of developed files.

However … its noise reduction was poor, introducing glowing haloes around stars when turned up to any useful level. Its shadows, highlights, and contrast adjustments were also poor – it was tough to make the test image look good without flattening contrast or blocking up shadows. Boosting clarity even a little added awful dark haloes to stars, making this a useless function. It has no lens correction, either automatic or manual. Like Topaz Studio, below, it cannot copy and paste settings to a batch of images, only to one image at a time, so it isn’t useful for time-lapse processing.

I cannot recommend this program, no matter how affordable it might be.

Silky Pix Developer Studio 8 (http://www.silkypix.us)

Popular among some camera manufacturers as their included raw developer, Silky Pix can be purchased separately ($80 list price for the standard version, $250 list price for the Pro version) with support for many cameras’ image files. It is available for MacOS and Windows. I tried the lower-cost “non-Pro” version 8. It did produce a good-looking end result, with good shadow and highlight recovery, and excellent color controls. Also on the plus side, Silky Pix has very good copy-and-paste functions for development settings, and good batch export functions, so it can be used to work on a folder of time-lapse frames.

On the down side, noise reduction, while acceptable, left an odd mottled pattern, hardly “silky.” The added “Neat” noise reduction option only smoothed out detail and was of little value except perhaps for very noisy images. Noise reduction did nothing to remove hot pixels, leaving lots of colored specks across the image. The program uses unorthodox controls whose purposes are not obvious. Instead of Highlights and Shadows you get Exposure Bias and HDR. Instead of Luminance and Color noise reduction, you get sliders labeled Smoothness and Color Distortion. You really need to read the extensive documentation to learn how to use this program.

I found sliders could be sticky and not easy to adjust precisely. The MacOS version was slow, often presenting long bouts of spinning beachballs while it performed some function. This is a program worth a try, and you might find you like it. But considering what the competition offers, I would not recommend it.

Topaz Studio (http://www.topazlabs.com)

Topaz Studio (Wide) — Topaz Studio at work on the test image

While Topaz Labs previously offered only plug-ins for Photoshop and other programs (their Topaz DeNoise 6 is very good), their Topaz Studio stand-alone program now offers full raw processing abilities.

It is for Mac and Windows. While it did a decent job developing my test Milky Way image (above), with good color and contrast adjustments, it cannot copy and paste settings from one image to a folder of images, only to one other image. Nor can it batch export a folder of images. Both deficiencies make it useless for time-lapse work.

In addition, while the base program is free, adding the “Pro Adjustments” modules I needed to process my test image (Noise Reduction, Dehaze, Precision Contrast, etc.) would cost $160 – each Adjustment is bought separately. Some users might like it, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

And … Adobe Photoshop Elements v18 (late 2017 release)

What about Adobe’s own Photoshop “Lite?” Elements is available for $99 as a boxed or downloadable one-time purchase, but with annual updates costing about $50. While it offers image and adjustment layers, it cannot do much with 16-bit images, and has very limited functions for developing raw files.

And its Lightroom-like Organizer module does not have any copy-and-paste settings or batch export functions, making it unsuitable for time-lapse production.

19C-Photoshop Elements — Photoshop Elements v18 – Showing its Version of Camera Raw Lite

Elements is for processing photos for the snapshot family album. Like Apple’s Photos and other free photo apps, I don’t consider Elements to be a serious option for nightscape and time-lapse work. But it can be pressed into service for raw editing and layering single images, especially by beginners.

However, a Creative Cloud Photo subscription doesn’t cost much more than buying, then upgrading Elements outright, yet gets you far, far more in professional-level software.

And Yet More…!

In addition, for just developing raw files, you likely already have software to do the job – the program that came with your camera.

20-Canon DPP — Canon Digital Photo Professional v4

For Canon it’s Digital Photo Professional (shown above); for Nikon it’s Capture NX; for Pentax it’s Digital Camera Utility, etc.

These are all capable raw developers, but have no layering capabilities. And they read only the files from their camera brand. If theirs is the only software you have, try it. They are great for learning on.

But you’ll find that the programs from other companies offer more features and better image quality.

What Would I Buy?

Except for Capture One, which I tested as a trial copy, I did buy all the software in question, for testing for my Nightscapes eBook.

However, as I’ve described, none of the programs tick all the boxes. Each has strengths, but also weaknesses, if not outright deficiencies. I don’t feel any can fully replace Adobe products for features and image quality.

DxO to Affinity

A possible non-Adobe combination for the best image quality might be DxO PhotoLab for raw developing and basic time-lapse processing, and Affinity Photo for stacking and compositing still images, from finished TIFF files exported out of DxO and opened and layered with Affinity.

But that combo lacks any cataloging option. For that you’d have to add ACDSee or Aftershot for a budget option. It’s hardly a convenient workflow I’d want to use.

DxO vs ON1 Noise — ON1 De-Bayer Artifacts (Right) Compared to DxO PhotoLab (Left), at 400%

I’d love to recommend ON1 Photo RAW more highly as a single solution, if only it had better raw processing results, and didn’t suffer from de-Bayering artifacts (shown in a 400% close-up above, compared to DxO PhotoLab). These add the star haloes and a subtle blocky pattern to the sky, most obvious at right.

To Adobe or Not to Adobe

I’m just not anxious, as others are, to “avoid Adobe.”

I’ve been a satisfied Creative Cloud subscriber for several years, and view the monthly fee as the cost of doing business. It’s much cheaper than the annual updates that boxed Photoshop versions used to cost. Nor am I worried about Adobe suddenly jacking up the fees or holding us hostage with demands.

21-LRTimelapse — LRTimelapse at Work on a Time-Lapse Sequence

For me, the need to use LRTimelapse (shown above) for about 80 percent of all the time-lapse sequences I shoot means the question is settled. LRTimelapse works only with Adobe software, and the combination works great. Sold.

I feel Camera Raw/Lightroom produces results that others can only just match, if that.

Only DxO PhotoLab beat Adobe for its excellent contrast enhancements and PRIME noise reduction.

Yes, other programs certainly have some fine features I wish Camera Raw or Lightroom had, such as:

Hot and dead pixel removal
Dark frame subtraction and flat field division
Better options for contrast enhancement
And adding local adjustments to raw files via layers, with more precise masking tools
Among others!

But those aren’t “must haves.”

Using ACR or Lightroom makes it easy to export raw files for time-lapse assembly, or to open them into Photoshop for layering and compositing, usually as “smart objects” for non-destructive editing, as shown below.

21-Photoshop Final Image — Final Layered Photoshop Image

Above is the final layered image, consisting of:

A stack of 4 tracked exposures for the sky (the test image is one of those exposures)
And 4 untracked exposures for the ground.

The mean stacking smooths noise even more. The masking reveals just the sky on the tracked set. Every adjustment layer, mask, and “smart filter” is non-destructive and can be adjusted later.

I’ll work on recreating this same image with the three non-Adobe programs capable of doing so – Affinity, Luminar, and ON1 Photo RAW – to see how well they do. But that’s the topic of a future blog.

Making the Switch?

The issue with switching from Adobe to any new program is compatibility.

While making a switch will be fine when working on all new images, reading the terabytes of old images I have processed with Adobe software (and being able to re-adjust their raw settings and layered adjustments) will always require that Adobe software.

If you let your Creative Cloud subscription lapse, as I understand it the only thing that will continue to work is Lightroom’s Library module, allowing you to review images only. You can’t do anything to them.

None of the contender programs will read Adobe’s XMP metadata files to display raw images with Adobe’s settings intact.

Conversely, nor can Adobe read the proprietary files and metadata other programs create.

ON1 Warning Dialog

With final layered Photoshop files, while some programs can read .PSD files, they usually open them just as flattened images, as ON1 warns it will do above. It flattened all of the non-destructive editing elements created in Photoshop. Luminar did the same.

23-Affinity Opening PSB File — A Layered Photoshop PSB File Opened in Affinity Photo

Only Affinity Photo (above) successfully read a complex and very large Photoshop .PSB file correctly, honouring at least its adjustment and image layers. So, if backwards compatibility with your legacy Photoshop images is important, choose Affinity Photo.

However, Affinity flattened Photoshop’s smart object image layers and their smart filters. Even Adobe’s own Photoshop Elements doesn’t honor smart objects.

Lest you think that’s a “walled garden” created by “evil Adobe,” keep in mind that the same will be true of the image formats and catalogs that all the contender programs produce.

To read the adjustments, layers, and “live filters” you create using any another program, you will need to use that program.

Will Affinity, DxO, Luminar, ON1, etc. be around in ten years?

Yes, you can save out flattened TIFFs that any program can read in the future, but that rules out using those other programs to re-work any of the image’s original settings.

In Conclusion!

24-DxO UPoint Local — U-Point Local Adjustments in DxO PhotoLab

I can see using DxO PhotoLab (above) or Raw Therapee for some specific images that benefit from their unique features.

Or using ACDSee as a handy image browser.

28-Luminar as Plug-In — Luminar 2018 as a Plug-In Within Photoshop

And ON1 and Luminar have some lovely effects that can be applied by calling them up as plug-ins from within Photoshop, and applied as smart filters. Above, I show Luminar working as a plug-in, applying its “Soft & Airy” filter.

In the case of Capture One and DxO PhotoLab, their ability to save images back as raw DNG files (the only contender programs of the bunch that can), means that any raw processing program in the future should be able to read the raw image.

27-CaptureOne DNG Opened in ACR — DNG Raw File Created by Capture One Opened in ACR

However, only Capture One’s Export to DNG option produced a raw file readable and editable by Adobe Camera Raw with its settings from Capture One (mostly) intact (as shown above).

Even so, I won’t be switching away from Adobe any time soon.

But I hope my survey has given you useful information to judge whether you should make the switch. And if so, to what program.

Thanks!

August 9, 2017May 8, 2019

Testing the Canon 6D Mark II for Nightscapes

Canon 6DMkII vs 6D Front

In a technical blog I compare the new Canon 6D Mark II camera with its predecessor, the Canon 6D, with the focus on performance for nightscape astrophotography.

No pretty pictures in this blog I’m afraid! This is a blog for gear geeks.

The long-awaited Canon 6D Mark II camera is out, replacing the original 6D after that camera’s popular 5-year reign as a prime choice among astrophotographers for all kinds of sky images, including nightscapes and time-lapses.

As all new cameras do, the 6D Mark II is currently fetching a full list price of $2000 U.S. Eventually it will sell for less. The original 6D, introduced in 2012 at that same list price, might still be available from many outlets, but for less, likely below $1500 US.

Shown on the left, above, the 6D Mark II is similar in size and weight to the original 6D.

However, the new Mark II offers 6240 x 4160 pixels for 26 megapixels, a bump up in resolution over the 5472 x 3648 20-megapixel 6D. The pixel pitch of the Mark II sensor is 5.7 microns vs. 6.6 microns for the 6D.

One difference is that the port for a remote release is now on the front, but using the same solid 3-pin N3 connector as the 6D and other full-frame Canons. That makes it compatible with all external controllers for time-lapse shooting.

TESTING FOR THE NIGHT

My interest is in a camera’s performance for long-exposure astrophotography, with images taken at high ISO settings. I have no interest in auto-focus performance (we shoot at night with focus set manually), nor how well a camera works for high-speed sports shooting.

To test the Mark II against the original 6D I took test shots at the same time of a high-contrast moonlit scene in the backyard, using a range of ISO speeds typical of nightscape scenes.

The comparisons show close-ups of a scene shown in full in the smaller inset screen.

COMPARING NOISE

The key characteristic of interest for night work is noise. How well does the camera suppress the noise inherent in digital images when the signal is boosted to the high ISO settings we typically use?

This set shows the 6D MkII at five ISOs, from ISO 1600 all the way up to the seldom-used ISO 25,600, all shot in Raw, not JPG. In all cases, no noise reduction was applied in later processing, so the results do look worse than what processed images would.

Click or tap on all images to expand each image to full screen for closer inspection.

This set shows the same range of ISOs with the original 6D. All were taken at the same aperture, f/2.8, with a 35mm lens. Exposures were halved for each successive bump up in ISO speed, to ensure equally exposed images.

Comparing the sets, the 6D MkII shows a much greater tendency to exhibit a magenta cast in the shadows at very high ISOs, plus a lower contrast in the shadows at increasing ISOs, and slightly more luminance noise than the 6D.

How much more noise the 6D MkII exhibits is demonstrated here.

To me, visually, the MkII presents about 1/2 stop, or EV, worse noise than the 6D.

In this example, the MkII exhibits a noise level at ISO 3200 (a common nightscape setting) similar to what the 6D does if set between ISO 4000 and 5000 – about 1/2 stop worse noise.

Frankly, this is surprising.

Yes, the MkII has a higher pixel count and therefore smaller pixels (5.7 microns in this case) that are always more prone to noise. But in the past, advances to the in-camera signal processing has prevented noise from becoming worse, despite increasing pixel count, or has even produced an improvement in noise.

For example, the 2012-vintage 6D is better for noise than Canon’s earlier 2008-era 5D MkII model by about half a stop, or EV.

After five years of camera development I would have expected a similar improvement in the 6D MkII. After all, the 6D MkII has Canon’s latest DIGIC 7 processor, vs. the older 6D’s DIGIC 5+.

Instead, not only is there no noise improvement, the performance is worse.

That said, noise performance in the 6D MkII is still very good, and better than you’ll get with today’s 24 megapixel cropped-frame cameras with their even smaller 4 micron pixels. But the full frame 6D MkII doesn’t offer quite as much an improvement over cropped-frame cameras as does the five-year-old 6D.

ISO INVARIANCY

In the previous sets all the images were well-exposed, as best they could be for such a contrasty scene captured with a single exposure.

What happens when Raw images are underexposed, then boosted later in exposure value in processing?

This is not an academic question, as that’s often the reality for nightscape images where the foreground remains dark. Bringing out detail in the shadows later requires a lot of Shadow Recovery or increasing the Exposure. How well will the image withstand that work on the shadows?

To test this, I shot a set of images at the same shutter speed, but at successively slower ISOs, from a well-exposed ISO 3200, to a severely underexposed ISO 100. I then boosted the Exposure setting later in Raw processing by an amount that compensated for the level of underexposure in the camera, from a setting of 0 EV at ISO 3200, to a +5 EV boost for the dark ISO 100 shots.

This tests for a camera’s “ISO Invariancy.” If a camera has a sensor and signal processing design that is ISO invariant, a boosted underexposed image at a slow ISO should look similar to a normally exposed image at a high ISO.

You’re just doing later in processing what a camera does on its own in-camera when bumping up the ISO.

But cameras that use ISO “variant” designs suffer from increased noise and artifacts when severely underexposed images are boosted later in Raw processing.

The Canon 6D and 6D MkII are such cameras.

This set above shows the results from the 6D Mark II. Boosting underexposed shadows reveals a lot of noise and a severe magenta cast.

These are all processed with Adobe Camera Raw, identical to the development engine in Adobe Lightroom.

This set above shows the results from the 6D. The older camera, which was never great for its lack of ISO Invariancy performance, is still much better than the new Mark II.

Underexposed shadows show less noise and discolouration in the 6D. For a comparison of the Canon 6D with the ISO Invariant Nikon D750, see my earlier Nikon vs. Canon blog from 2015 . The Nikon performs much better than the 6D.

Effectively, this is the lack of dynamic range that others are reporting when testing the 6D MkII on more normal daytime images. It really rears its ugly head in nightscapes.

The lesson here is that the Mark II needs to be properly exposed as much as possible.

Don’t depend on being able to extract details later from the shadows. The adage “Expose to the Right,” which I explain at length in my Nightscapes eBook, applies in spades to the 6D MkII.

DARK FRAME BUFFER

All the above images were taken with Long Exposure Noise Reduction (LENR) off. This is the function that, when turned on, forces the camera to take and internally subtract a dark frame – an image of just the noise – reducing thermal noise and discolouration in the shadows.

A unique feature of Canon full-frame cameras is that when LENR is on you can take several exposures in quick succession before the dark frame kicks in and locks up the camera. This is extremely useful for deep-sky shooting.

The single dark frame then gets applied to the buffered “light frames.”

The 6D Mark II, when in either Raw or in Raw+JPG can take 3 shots in succession. This is a downgrade from the 6D which can take 4 shots when in Raw+JPG. Pity.

ADOBE CAMERA RAW vs. DIGITAL PHOTO PROFESSIONAL

My next thought was that Adobe Camera Raw, while it was reading the Mark II files fine, might not have been de-Bayering or developing them properly. So I developed the same image with both Raw developers, Adobe’s and Canon’s latest version of their own Digital Photo Professional (DPP).

Here I did apply a modest and approximately similar level of noise reduction to both images:

In ACR: Color at 25, Luminosity at 40, with Sharpness at 25

In DPP: Chrominance at 8, Luminosity at 8, with Sharpness at 2

Yes, DPP did do a better job at eliminating the ugly magenta cast, but did a much worse job at reducing overall noise. DPP shows a lot of blockiness, detail loss, and artifacts left by the noise reduction.

Adobe Camera Raw and/or Lightroom remain among the best of many Raw developers.

IMAGE AVERAGING

A new feature the 6D Mark II offers is the ability to shoot and stack images in-camera. It can either “Add” the exposure values, or, most usefully, “Average” them, as shown here.

Other newer Canon DSLRs also offer this feature, notably the 7D MkII, the 5D MkIV, the 5Ds, and even the entry-level 80D. So the 6D MkII is not unique. But the feature was not on the 6D.

Here’s the benefit.

The left image is a single exposure; the middle is an average stack of 4 exposures stacked in camera; the right image an average stack of 9 exposures, the maximum allowed.

Noise smooths out a lot, with less noise the more images you stack. The result is a single Raw file, not a JPG. Excellent!

While this kind of stacking can be done later in processing in Photoshop, or in any layer-based program, many people might find this in-camera function handy.

Except, as you can see, the sky will exhibit star trails, and not as well defined as you would get from stacking them with a “Lighten” blend mode, as all star trail stacking routines use.

So this averaging method is NOT the way to do star trails. The Mark II does not offer the Brighten mode some other new Canons have that does allow for in-camera star trail stacking. Again, a pity in a camera many will choose for astrophotography.

Nevertheless, the Average mode is a handy way to create foreground landscapes with less noise, which then have to be composited later with a sky image or images.

OTHER FEATURES

On the left, below, the Mark II has a nearly identical layout of buttons and controls to the 6D on the right. So owners of the older model will feel right at home with the Mark II. That’s handy, as we astrophotographers work in the dark by feel!

Of course the big new feature, a first for Canon in a full-frame camera, is the Mark II’s fully articulated screen. It flips out, tilts, and even flips around to face forward. This is super-great for all astrophotography, especially when conducted by aging photographers with aching backs!

And the screen, as with the entry-level cropped-frame Canons, is a touch screen. For someone who hasn’t used one before – me! – that’ll take some getting used to, if only in just remembering to use it.

And it remains to be seen how well it will work in the cold. But it’s great to have.

INTERVAL TIMER

Like other late-model Canon DSLRs, the 6D MkII has a built-in intervalometer. It works fine but is useable only on exposures with internally set shutter speeds up to 30 seconds.

However, setting the Interval so it fires the shutter with a minimal gap of 1 second between shots (our usual requirement for night time-lapses) is tricky: You have to set the interval to a value not 1 second, but 2 to 3 seconds longer than the shutter speed. i.e. an exposure of 30 seconds requires an interval of 33 seconds, as shown above. Anything less and the camera misses exposures.

Why? Well, when set to 30 seconds the camera actually takes a 32-second exposure. Surprise!

Other cameras I’ve used and tested with internal intervalometers (Nikon and Pentax) behave the same way. It’s confusing, but once you are used to it, the intervalometer works fine.

Except … the manual suggests the only way to turn it off and stop a sequence is to turn off the camera. That’s crude. A reader pointed out that it is also possible to stop a time-lapse sequence by hitting the Live View Start/Stop button. However, that trick doesn’t work on sequences programmed with only a second between frames, as described above. So stopping a night time-lapse is inelegant to say the least. With Nikons you can hold down the OK button to stop a sequence, with the option then of restarting it if desired.

Also, the internal Intervalometer cannot be used for exposures longer than 30 seconds. Again, that’s the case with all in-camera intervalometers in other models and brands.

BULB TIMER

As with many other new Canons, the Mark II has a Bulb Timer function.

When on Bulb you can program in exposure times of any length. That’s a nice feature that, again, might mean an external intervalometer is not needed for many situations.

PLAYBACK SCREEN

A new feature I like is the greatly expanded information when reviewing an image.

TL;DR Conclusions

Avoiding Adobe?

Raw Editing vs. Layer-Based Editing

The Challenge

The Competitors

Feature Focus

Summary Comparison Table

Feature-by-Feature Details — 1. Browsing and Cataloging

Feature-by-Feature Details — 2. Lens Corrections

Feature-by-Feature Details — 3. Noise Reduction and Sharpening

Feature-by-Feature Details — 4. Shadow Recovery

Feature-by-Feature Details — 5. Local Adjustments and Masking

Feature-by-Feature Details — 6. Overall Finished Image Quality

Feature-by-Feature Details — 7. Copy & Paste Settings

Feature-by-Feature Details — 8. Batch Export

Feature-by-Feature Details — 9. Advanced Features

Program-by-Program Summary

Why Didn’t I Test …?

Recommendations

Finally — Download Trials and Test!

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TL;DR SUMMARY

METHODOLOGY

THE CONTENDERS

NIGHTSCAPE TEST

WIDE-FIELD IMAGE TEST

TELESCOPIC DEEP-SKY TEST

COMPARING DxO and TOPAZ OPTIONS

COMPARING AI TO OLDER NON-AI PROGRAMS

YOUR RESULTS MAY VARY

WHAT ABOUT ADOBE?

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METHODOLOGY

TL;DR SUMMARY

Lens Specs and Applications

Centre Sharpness

Corner Aberrations

Frame Vignetting

LENS Corrections

Same Focal Length Comparisons

Compared to DSLR Lenses

Mechanical Points

FINISHED IMAGES GALLERIES

CONCLUSIONs and recommendations

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TL;DR Summary

R5 Pros

R5 Cons

CHOOSING THE R5

LIVE VIEW FRAMING

LIVE VIEW FOCUSING

NOISE PERFORMANCE — NIGHTSCAPES

NOISE PERFORMANCE — DEEP-SKY

ISO INVARIANCY

THERMAL NOISE

LONG EXPOSURE NOISE REDUCTION

STAR QUALITY

RED SENSITIVITY

EDGE ARTIFACTS and EDGE GLOWS

Resolution — Nightscapes

Resolution — lunar imaging

Resolution — deep sky

CAN YOU CreatE resolution?

VIDEO Resolution

Solar eclipse use

Canon CLOG3

Sample Moon Movies

LOw-Light VIDEO

Sample aurora Movies

BATTERY LIFE — Stills and video

OVERHEATING

Features and usability

FIRMWARE FEATURES

OTHER FEATURES

CONCLUSION

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