SilkyPix: new user-to-user forum

[MikeA]

The company that markets SilkyPix Developer Studio in the U.S. (Shortcut Software) has established user-to-user forums for various products they represent, including SilkyPix:

[B]http://www.shortcutinc.com/forums/[/B]

There isn't a lot of traffic there at the moment. If you're a SilkyPix user please consider giving that forum a looking-over and participating.

This has been a long time in coming. SilkyPix doesn't have the easiest-to-understand documentation in the world, and it has been difficult to get tech support due to the language barrier. I hope Shortcut's new forum can help alleviate some of that.

The "uber" moderator is John Neville, a photographer in the UK. John wrote some pretty good documentation of his own for SilkyPix and made a PDF of it (he sells it at a very reasonably low price). I imagine the link to his site must appear within his profile in the forum (which of course would call for being a member there -- hint hint

[I am not affiliated with Shortcut Software or ISL in any way.]

 

[schwann]

Will Silky Pix read nef from d700?

 

[MikeA]

Will Silky Pix read nef from d700?

I haven't heard. You might check in that forum... or go to the shortcutinc.com web site to see if there's an announcement about it. The SilkyPix authors tend to be quick about updating the program to support new raw file formats.

 

[schwann]

I haven't heard. You might check in that forum... or go to the shortcutinc.com web site to see if there's an announcement about it. The SilkyPix authors tend to be quick about updating the program to support new raw file formats.

Now it does......

 

[stane1967]

What about D90...

 

[puddleduck]

Its a very strange program, sometimes it can produce amazing results, but the UI is so odd that it tends to happen by accident!

 

[MikeA]

Its a very strange program, sometimes it can produce amazing results, but the UI is so odd that it tends to happen by accident!

I found after using it for some weeks that I can get predictable results most of the time. It did take some struggle. I almost gave up on it -- for one thing, the documentation was bloody-awful -- but went back to it one more time...and finally started getting the hang of it.

One major disappointment: it doesn't seem to handle D3 high-ISO files at all well. For those, it's either Capture NX or Lightroom. If there's a way with SilkyPix to get really good definition of fine image detail, or good highlight recovery, I haven't found it yet. If I need the best image detail I have to consider Capture One (which I dislike generally). The differences in rendition of fine detail can be very noticeable between C1 and SP. SilkyPix's tone curve seems too harsh, and I have yet to get the hang of its highlight-recovery feature. There's something they could learn from Lightroom and C1: it isn't necessary to have a gazillion sliders. LR and C1 both do a great job of highlight recovery with a single slider.

Those things aside, SP is capable of producing outstanding color; it's one of the few raw converters with HSL color correction; and its white-balance fine-tune dialog is the best I've run across. At first I thought that the "film" selections were just gimmicky, until I realized that they really do work as advertised and are useful indeed. The lens aberration controls are good (does any raw converter other than DxO have such controls built in?), and I love the right-click-and-correct-chromatic-aberration "here" feature -- a simple but brilliant feature.

Good things and bad. The usual!

Despite my having posted the first message in this thread, I've had to give up on the SP forum. It's been a while since I was there, but during the time that I tried to get responses to tech questions about the program, the marketing company that's supposed to be in charge of support (at least in the USA) didn't respond at all -- they were hardly in evidence there. Nothing from ISL, the authors. Oh, well...

[Edit: and a correction -- I don't think John Neville is the moderator now]