Italy J5 + 6.7-13

Hello boys and girls,

I went for a short trip in Italy this week. Took the J5 + 6.7-13, and my Google Pixel 7.
I spent a lot of time taking and processing photos.
The reason is that I shot raw with the J5, and I shot the same pictures Raw + Jpeg with the Pixel 7 (you cannot shoot only raw with it: it's jpeg only or raw + jpeg).
The Pixel 7 raws are in the dng format, and cannot be processed with DxO PL. I use On1 Photoraw to process the dngs, but most of the time I can't get better results than the native jpegs.
Long story short: the J5 images are better, as expected. But not by much. I'd like to see the results I could achieve by processing the Pixel 7 dngs with DxO. But I'm afraid it won't happen...
Below, you'll find some pictures I took with the J5. As usual, no creative photography here: just postcards. But the monuments I visited are so amazing, I think it's worth posting these images.
I have tons of images, so, I'll post just some of them. Others to come if you like them.
Let's try with only one image, to see if it works.

Nice to see some more of your travelog photos from places I will likely never be able to visit. This first image worked and looks good, with excellent sharpness and detail. Please post more of them for us to enjoy.

Well, it seems it works.
Let's add some images...

Thanks for the additional images. Amazing interior art, and good work with the UWA lens.

Thank you. Yes, amazing interior art. In Ravenne, stunning mosaics. I'm not religious at all, but I was impressed by these interiors.

Really great images.

Lcat

Excellent as usual André, particularly the first two. Also nice to see you are still using the J5, like you, I am trying to learn to live with just a phone, but am failing in terms of enjoyment. Thanks for sharing your beautiful pictures.
Regards
Gary

Thank you. Glad you liked them
André

Thanks Gary
Same here. No pleasure taking images with a phone. And more so since the J5 is such a lovely camera.
Best regards
André

Andre,
Your photos are always more than postcards but even taken as postcards they do exactly what they were meant to do; show others places that they may never be able to see in person (that’s me!) and share the beauty of the ancient world. Thanks for posting.

Wow…incredible sights…well photographed. I do hope to get there one day myself.

Question:

Leaving the “enjoyment” element out of the equation, what remaining gaps do you see between the images from the two cameras?

Thank you Paul. You said it better than I could do myself. My purpose is to share images of beautiful places I'm lucky enough to visit.
Glad you like them.
All the best.

Thank you. I encourage you to get there. Italy is an incredible country with tons of medieval buildings (incredible churches), and vestiges of the antiquity.
André

If you use jpeg, there is little difference between the two, but the colors of the J5 are more natural than the Pixel 7.
But I only use raw with the J5. Converted with DxO, the raw files of the J5 give images generally more defined than those of the Pixel (I say "generally", because sometimes, it is almost impossible to find more details in the pictures of the J5).
It's worth noting that I haven't found any software capable of getting the best out of the dngs produced by the Pixel 7. I use On1 Photoraw, but I almost never manage to get better results than the jpegs. Maybe with a better converter, the results would be better.
The other thing is that the J5 gives 20 MP images, compared to 12 for the Pixel.
Whenever you want to get details, you have to zoom in with the Pixel, and the results are disappointing. Whereas with the J5 and its 20 MP, you can get very detailed pictures with the 6.7-13, despite its short focal lengths.
The problem is less with the Pixel 7 pro, which has an X5 optical zoom. I didn't want to buy it for 3 reasons: too big, too expensive, and I very rarely need to zoom when I'm traveling.
That said, I must say the Pixel 7 remains an impressive photophone, giving excellent images on my 24' monitor.
Hope this helps.

André

Thank you for your detailed reply. I appreciate it.

It was interesting to see this comparison, particularly after reading your J5 settings tips in the reply to another post. It would be really helpful if you could now compare the quality of JPEG images straight from a J5 with images from the same camera shot in RAW, followed by your usual post-processing. Obviously the latter will yield less noise. What about the other factors influencing image quality? Would the interior church photos have been signficantly different as straight JPEG output?

I always shoot in raw. Here's a quick comparison of a J5 photo with the 18.5 taken at ISO 800. I used NX Studio to export an unedited jpeg from the original raw file - this is what the shot would have looked like if taken as a jpeg with no post processing.

Here's the same image with DxO PhotoLab Deep Prime used to address the noise followed by post processing in Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop.

Thanks for the 2-way comparison. One question remains: How different would the results be, if rather than exporting the unedited jpeg from the original raw file, you took the shot with the camera set to JPEG rather than to RAW; ie. utilizing the J5's jpeg compression algorithm rather than the software's? If you have a moment to do a 3-way comparison, it might prove interesting.

I'm not sure if a jpeg processed in camera would be any different from the raw file converted to jpeg in Nikon NX Studio. It is my understanding that NX Studio applies all the settings active in the camera at the time the shot was taken.

Why not try it yourself? Set your J5 to raw + jpeg with your preferred parameter settings.Then use the free NX Studio to convert the raw file to jpeg. That way you can test on your typical subject and in your typical light.

I've done these tests many times, and raw gives always better results. At high iso, the jpegs start to loose color depth, and the noise reduction applied in-camera smears details.
The raw image maintains colors and detail, but of course, the noise is much more present before processing.
The recent softwares eliminate noise without smearing details, and the result is much better.
This applies in low light. In good light, there is very little difference between raw and jpeg, except that if you have blown highlights in the original image, you can recover them (but not always entirely) much easier with the raw file.
Sorry, I don't have time to test for you. You can look at the DPReview studio test images to compare raw and jpeg.

And Rich gave you a very interesting comparison.

With the Pixel 7, jpegs are generally better than raws (dng). But it's due to the fact that the files are AI processed in-camera, and as I said, I've yet to find a suitable raw converter.

André

Thank you. You've anticipated and answered all my concerns. Much apppreciated.