Canon 6D RAWs processed awfully bad?!

Do you have any picture styles set in your Canon 5D Mark III? I.e. "Preserve Highlights"? These are not reflected in the raw. Aperture is processing only the raw when doing the raw developement and does not apply any of the in-camera settings. But the camera-generated preview - show when loading the image - does reflect the preprocessing by the camera. Adobe raw converter on the other hand does understand the "Preserve Highlight" setting and applies it, but it is camera specific. I would not use any camera programs when shooting raw. You will not see in the viewer, what your raw image will be like; if it is over exposed for example.

See this discussion: RAW Processing problems with Canon 5D Mark iii

Regards

Léonie

Yes, I had a look. The contrast and noise are most obvious in the darker areas with bad lighting situation. That remonds me of another discussion. Aperture seems to have a problem with the developement of raws taken in artificial light, see: Re: Strange blue color

How are your "Raw Fine Tuning" settings in the Adjustment panel? I found that the default value for the "Boost" is way too high for my Canon raws. Reducing "Boost" and hue helped a lot to bring out detail. If the controls are not grayed out, I'd also try to adjust the noise and sharpening controls in the Raw Fine Tuning and save the best settings as a default for your cameras.

Regards

Looking at your newest examples, this seems again to be a problem of the strong blue colors. I'd send feedback to Apple and file a bug-report: http://www.apple.com/feedback/aperture.html

Some of the missing sharpness looks like color bleeding to me, also aliasing at the strong edges. Have you also tried the demosaic setting in the Raw FineTuning?

Regards

Léonie

Can you put some of the 6D's RAW files somewhere they can be downloaded? Do you have the same problem with 6D RAW files downloaded from the Web (such as sample files provided by reviewers)? Can you provide a link to them as well?

It seems like a bug, but it is worth ruling out your system, your camera, and your workflow.

I'm having this same issue with Aperture 3 and my Canon 6D. It wasn't a problem until I updated my system to OS X 10.8.4. The same thing happens in Preview too. So my guess is that it's Apple's RAW processing and not just Aperture. I've started shooting RAW+JPEG and the difference is staggering. The RAW images are way too dark and heavily vignetted. Here's a sample (JPEG on the left, RAW on the right, no adjustments to either).

I have been fortunate enough to recently upgrade myself to a Canon EOS 6D. After my first shoot, I was heartbroken to see the poor quality of the images--dark, low contrast, etc. This was fixable in Aperture with some effort, but then I started noticing serious blue and orange color artifacts around high-contrast edges, and a near total loss of detail in deeper shadows. I was about to return the 6D as defective but then tried a couple images in Canon's RAW processing software. And I was blown away by the results--gorgeous images, perfect contrast and loads of shadow detail that could be extracted with the right adjustments. I also grabbed a trial of Lightroom, which produced results similart to Canon's software.

So there's nothing wrong with the camera. Apple's RAW converter for the 6D is just flat busted. How could something this bad have actually made it out the door?

I've been a long-term Aperture user--since version 2.0, and have grown to love the interface and the effortless workflow for organizing images. But the issues with the 6D RAW converter have pretty much forced me to abandon Aperture over night. Hello Lightroom.

As with previous comments, I suspect this is really just part of the thin end of the wedge with Aperture and that it may be headed for extinction. Sad.

Here is an example that shows the shadow issues. Both are 100% views of he same RAW file loaded without any additional adjustments--except that I've cranked up the shadow level to illustrate the Aperture RAW converter's failure:

One thing to check first - Ensure you don't have highlight tone priority set on your Canon. This causes it to under-expose the shots to protect the highlights by about a stop, which then causes a lot more work in the shadows.

That said, Lightroom tends to be able to do a better job pulling up shadows than Aperture does. Lightroom's converter as of Lightroom 4 made a pretty big advance. Aperture is OK for moderate bumps in the shadows; I've found if you stay under values of about 40, it tends to be OK. However, you've cranked up the shadows to 60 in your example and I've found that problematic as well. When you crank the shadows that much, you'll get noise, and the color is off - it tends to be a bit desaturated. In cases like this where half a building is in direct sunlight and the other is in shade, it's a pretty big range for a sensor; I might have bracketed the shot and considered HDR or blending the two exposures in Photoshop to get better results as there's not a ton of data in shadows that deep.