Lightroom 4 was a major step forward in usable highlight latitude compared to LR 3. Any LR4 vs Silkypix comparison is going to show more apparent DR in LR4. I have proven this to myself many times, and others have demonstrated it as well. See here for discussion and illustration of how much better LR 4 is at reclaiming highlight info compared to LR3:

Revealing More Detail > Optimizing Detail and Contrast with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4
Lightroom 4 Review: Digital Photography Review


Don, I think if you process those same E-M5 files in Silkypix, you'll find that most if not all of the DR advantage goes away.

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Amin
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I guess that the question is how much processing is occurring in the act of opening a file as a raw and then saving it to a tiff.

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Nic
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>> Insert quote here <<

Nic, LR4 takes highlight info from one color channel when the others have clipped and extrapolates intelligently to basically reconstruct lost highlight detail. There's just no way you can do DR testing with one camera using LR4 and the other using something else.

One option would be to use Raw Therapy for both, but Raw Therapy support for G5 is rudimentary, and I had to do a ton of tweaking to get the levels right in the OP of this thread.

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That's where I was wondering what is or isn't being lost in translation in the transfer from one filetype to the next, and whether the resulting tiff file offers the same data for Lightroom to work with as it would have with an RW2 file direct from the camera.

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Nic
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>> Insert quote here <<

I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

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Interesting!

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Ok folks here's the proof that converting to a a tiff in Silkypics then processing it in LR is nowhere near as good as processing a raw file directly in LR.
These were taken with a G3 in raw one processed directly in LR the other converted to a tiff in Silkypix then processed in LR.
I have turned the highlights slider to min (-100) and increased the shadows to +98 and reduced the exposure by a stop.

As you can see the highlights were completely lost in the tiff and more recoverable in the raw.

So I think we can't really judge the G5's DR until LR supports it.

This was shot with no camera exposure compensation.

EDIT. Better results can be obtained by processing in Silkypix first, it seems a tiff file is still "fixed" and while offering more latitude of adjustment than a jpg doesn't have the latitude of a raw file.

Raw


Tiff


This was shot with -2 stop camera exposure compensation.

Raw


Tiff

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Wait, did you simply do a straight conversion in SP, or did you try to save the highlights first, and then convert to TIFF. If you did the first, no duh.

A tiff is still a "baked" file. Any processing you want to do to recover highlights or shadows, or adjust color balance, and probably a number of other things needs to be done before the conversion to Tiff, within SP. Once you've "baked" the blown highlights into the tiff, they're blown forever.

Silkypix probably isn't as good as LR in that regard, but it's still going to be way better than trying to recover data that no longer exists. This has nothing to do with Silkypix. If you do a straight conversion to Tiff in LR, without first recovering the highlights, and then feed the TIFF back into LR, you'd see the same result.

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Wow thanks for the SP tiff vs RAW comparison. Striking difference.

Here's hoping we get RAW support from adobe soon. :D

Until then, I've been pretty happy with the jpegs from the G5..though that reminds me that I've been meaning to change the NR down a notch.

Paul, that last conversion comparison really shows a significant loss of highlight data with the SillyPix conversion to TIF.

I was quite surprised when I saw the loss of the very bright highlights in some of my outdoor G5 test images that were SilkyPix conversions to TIF, and especially so with my kitchen DR test.

I'm certainly looking forward to the LR4 update!

I have completely amended my DR Test post earlier in this thread to make it quite clear that the SilkyPix conversion method that I used flawed the test result.

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Don