| Photo: Mitchell Clark |
Adobe has released its build of Camera Raw that supports the newly-announced Sony a7R VI, which allows us to process the Raw test images of our studio scene and produce Raw conversions from the samples we shot.
Our test scene is designed to simulate a variety of textures, colors, and detail types you’ll encounter in the real world. It also has two illumination modes, full even light and low directional light, to see the effect of different lighting conditions.
The Raw for our base ISO shot tells a very similar story to the JPEG: the a7R VI captures a bit more detail than its predecessor could, furthering its lead over the 45MP competition. Viewed at comparative sizes, there isn’t a noticeable difference in the noise levels at ISO 100.
Thankfully, this remains the case at mid and high ISOs as well, meaning you’re not paying a penalty for the increased speed and resolution compared to the a7R V. Given that the line has always been focused on image quality above speed, it’s nice to see that the increased flexibility brought by the a7R VI’s stacked sensor doesn’t make it worse for its core audience.
Now that we can compare the two, we can also see that Sony’s JPEG engine is doing a good job of including the details captured by the Raws at base ISO. At higher ISOs, it’s deft enough at applying noise reduction to include most of the Raws’ detail.
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The ability to process Raws also lets us turn our Raws into HDR JPEGs. You can view the original on a device with an HDR-capable display to see the full effect. Sony a7R VI | Sony FE 24-70mm F2.8 GM II | 24mm | F11 | 1/20 sec | ISO 100 | Processed in ACR |
Be sure to also check out our sample gallery, as we’ve added a few new shots and reprocessed a few of the original images from it. Many of these edits involved pulling up the shadows after we shot the images to preserve highlights, exploiting this sensor’s excellent dynamic range. We’ll go into more depth on that topic in a future article.