ISL SILKYPIX BETA

I had some odd moments of leisure in my busy days, so I tested it and I am impressed. It's amazingly great. Small things such as interfaces will be improved in the product version. So, here I will talk mainly about "the quality of RAW development".

Ichikawa Lab's web site says

"SILKYPIX has not only reduced the Chromatic Aberration and jaggys but also achieved high S/N in both color and brilliance. It also maintains the color and brilliance resolution. As result, you get smooth, clear pictures. You do not need over sharpen images anymore because higher resolution expresses rich gradation even at the edges of an image. With SILKYPIX you can get very fine, colorful pictures which rivals very fine film images." -Ichikawa Lab

I completely agree. Mostly I've used RAW mode for pictures of the moon, because I'd like to enhance the smooth gray surface. To improve the appearance of the mares and plains in the center of an image, I've composited several RAW mode images then used unsharp to improve the focus.

Compare these four pictures. Taken when my telescope collimation was not good, these are just test pieces. (All pictures link to large format screen shots. These are not the actual files but I used TIFF because at least there is no more archive noise on the image.)

These were carefully developed then made two samples for Photoshop and Astronomy Graphic tool Stella Image 4 for 16bit RAW processing.

All photos taken by Canon 10D with Orion 300mm f4 Reflector without any lenses.

Pictures to the right are screenshots of enlarged areas of the pictures above. You can see that the SILKYPIX image of the gray surface is smooth without noise. Stella Image is not bad but it needs more unsharp process to get focus. SILKYPIX and Photoshop are already sharp. Stella Image's processing step is slow even on a Pentium IV 2.8GHz with 2GB of memory running on Windows 2000. SILKYPIX, process was quicker even at 16bit. SILKYPIX runs the CPU to 50% when processing.

After developing I ran unsharp. The result is below. Stella Image's result is a little bit soft focus but looks smooth like SILKYPIX. Photoshop looks rough. (this is why I composited several RAW pictures)

After I realize it worked, I decided to try to process a good picture. My result is below. (click to browse the enlarged image). After seeing the SILKYPIX results I feel my compositing and processing in Photoshop was more difficult and wasted time.

SILKYPIX eliminates the need for some compositing. SILKYPIX RAW image development is greatly improves the image result. If you felt that raw image processing did not improve the image enough to justify the time it took SILKYPIX changes that. Digital pictures have a lot of possibility in the future. When the commercial version SILKYPIX is released, it will be a "must use" for serious professional photographs and the commercial photograph market.

Left is the final result of SILKYPIX (same image as right above). The same picture, by 13 shot composite process was published in this web. I think SILKYPIX did a better job.

SILKYPIX's Web site

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[Additional Information 1]  ...so, how about a deep sky Nebula? I developed one (shown right). It worked, too!!