
You can rate images, but that’s about it. Its browser lets you find images, but its organizational tools are primitive. Photo Ninja won’t help you make photo books or webpages, and it has no artsy filters. Photo Ninja can’t make spot corrections (removing blemishes or red-eye) or local adjustments (brightening a bride’s dress or deepening the blue of the sky).

Nevertheless, Photo Ninja is still at version 1, and it lacks a lot of features found in its older, more mature competitors. This approach doesn’t seem as good as DxO Optics Pro’s carefully engineered camera and lens profiles, but it does offer the user more flexibility. The program also has a variety of “training” modes where you can teach it about the behavior of your cameras and lenses. Photo Ninja provides two demosaicing modes, normal and enhanced the latter is helpful if the default rendering generates moiré patterns. In addition to the basic tools required for conversion (exposure, white balance, sharpening and noise reduction, black-and-white conversion, cropping), Photo Ninja does an excellent job fixing chromatic aberration and adjusting for lens and/or perspective distortion.

#Photoninja video software
Photo Ninja 1.1 has an impressive list of features for a new program, especially one produced by a small, independent software company. Note that I was able to get Lightroom to render the image as well as Photo Ninja, but it took some work. The Photo Ninja version is strikingly better. The file underneath is Photo Ninja’s default conversion. The first file on top shows Lightroom 4.4’s default conversion of a difficult exposure. My clients don’t usually like every pore or wrinkle to be visible. You can, of course, edit your images in Photo Ninja to make them a little softer than the default conversion, but you can also edit your images in Lightroom or Aperture to heighten detail and clarity. Frankly, Photo Ninja’s default rendering of some of my portrait files was too detailed. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing: Lightroom (like Aperture) takes a more conservative approach to the initial rendering, and leaves a lot of creative decisions regarding noise reduction, sharpening, color, and contrast to me. With Lightroom, on the other hand, additional post-conversion tweaking is de rigueur. Photo Ninja seems to try to get the image “right” on the first try, leaving me little to do but open the image, crop, and export. Second, Photo Ninja and Lightroom represent very different philosophies about rendering images. This is one type of photo that Photo Ninja seems particularly good at rendering.
#Photoninja video plus
This image underwent Photo Ninja’s default conversion plus a quick tweak to geometry (to minimize perspectival distortion) and a small boost in saturation to bring out the blue in the sky. Raw Photo Processor. If your photographic work is detail-oriented-for example, if you shoot landscapes or architecture-you may see Photo Ninja’s defaults as a revelation.
#Photoninja video pro
It’s from PictureCode, the same small Austin, Texas, company that produced Noise Ninja, which for years was the choice of many pro photographers for removing digital noise from images.Īfter converting, comparing, and then post-processing scores of images side by side in Photo Ninja and Lightroom (and occasionally in other programs, including Aperture, DxO Optics Pro, Raw Photo Processor, and Snapseed), I came to two conclusions.įirst, Photo Ninja’s default processes for rendering Raw files are remarkably effective-not often better than, but often on a par with my all-time favorite tool for challenging conversions, In this regard, Photo Ninja’s pedigree really shows. Sometimes, the Photo Ninja rendering of a shot exhibited finer detail but also less visible noise than the Lightroom rendering this result is especially impressive, because ordinarily the fix for noise involves blurring, which also hurts detail. This is the kind of Raw capture that Photo Ninja does best with. The sky is a nice, realistic blue and you can even see the jet contrails, and yet the exposure of the main part of the picture shows acceptable exposure, good color and rich detail.

The image shown here, however, is Photo Ninja’s default conversion - with no tweaks at all. For example, Aperture’s initial conversion of the photo at the top of this article (of a mule caravan in the Grand Canyon) left virtually no color or detail in the sky in the upper right corner. Images that had a wide exposure range (shadowy woods and sunny sky) often opened in Photo Ninja without the blown highlights I’d occasionally see in Lightroom or Aperture. So how well does Photo Ninja do for me? Surprisingly well. Compared with renderings of the same files in other Raw converters such as Adobe Camera Raw (Īperture, Photo Ninja’s default rendering of my Raw files typically had finer detail and more vivid color. How well a program’s initial conversion suits your taste is the first question to ask of a photo-processing app.
