
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.
