And finally some examples for color and monochrome modes in half resolution mode (click thumbnail to see it in full size).

This is a resolution comparison between ACR and RPP with no sharpening applied. Click the picture to see 100% crop. There are some differences in colors saturation and camera profiles, but ignore them for this sample - colors should be discussed separately. You may download the original CRW file here and do your own testing.

Another small test to show how different converters handle shadows and noise - again ACR and RPP. Click thumbnails to see full size pictures. You may download original Raw file here.

The file is a tough case - intentionally underexposed for at least 4 stops with original ISO 200 and it makes this picture ISO 3200. Keep this in mind when looking at the noise - these are 100% crops. Pay attention to those green blotches on the left crop (ACR) - at such an ISO it’s expected to have noise, but those blotches produced by ACR, not by the camera, due to low precision and rounding of calculations. Processing settings were as simple as possible - all 0 in ACR (including chroma noise filtering since RPP doesn’t apply any!) and +4 in exposure. In RPP I aligned exposures and white balance to make them as similar as possible.

Some examples to visualize the main idea behind RPP design - try not to spoil images during development, so you don’t have to “fix” them later with artificial “super smart” sharpening, noise filtering and color mappings.

This is an example of highlights recovery with “Guess Tone” feature for a single toned object - before and after. Click on pictures to see full sized images.

This is an example of highlights recovery for originally neutral object - before and after. Click on pictures to see full sized images.

Originally I was going to include Aperture 1.x to the comparison and even downloaded it’s trial version, but it failed so miserably on exposure adjustment operation, that there was simply no point to post it here. Now with help of some RPP users I retried the test with Aperture 2.1 and here is result. Left is Aperture, right is RPP. I tried to bring their settings in sync so pictures look as similar as possible at least in brightness level and here are screenshots of both Aperture and RPP control panels.

Overall - a lot better compared to previous versions, but you may still see blotchy noise and loss of details. Keep in mind that I left option Auto Noise Compensation in Aperture on because without it result looks really weird with those greenish monochrome shadows. This means that I had to compare noise compensated Aperture image to not filtered RPP which is not entirely correct, but I’ll let you make your own conclusions. RPP settings are also severely crippled - decreased saturation, gamma curve (I’d never use it on a real picture - film curve works a lot nicer) and disabled enhancements. You may play with those on your own of course.

This is an example for Compressed Exposure control (click thumbnails for bigger views). First picture is a regular Exposure adjustment for 1.5 stops - we have a lot of clipping in extreme highlights. Second picture is the same 1.5 stop adjustment with Compressed Exposure, but there is a lot more details preserved in highlights, they still look very natural and overall tonality of the image is not changed. I’m sure you’ll find a lot of examples like this among your pictures :)