Followup on Nikon D3 aliasing

Following up on Monday’s entry on aliasing, it appears that the ugly horizontal bars seen are the result of Capture NX demosaicing algorithm; processing the same image with Adobe Camera RAW does not result in the ugly horizontal green stripes, but it does with RAW Developer.

ACR, RAW Developer and Capture NX also have radically different ideas about color and contrast, all images were processed at 5500°K with minimal settings and sharpening off (Smart Sharpen done later in CS3), no attempt was made to match them further in terms of contrast or color.

Click to see larger images/crops. The Capture NX and RAW Developer results look troublesome for prints of even moderate size; such artificial-looking results are easily detected by the eye. Of course there are techniques for reducing the impact of such nasties, but extra work is required. For this image the Adobe Camera Raw results show the least amount of undesirable artifacts.

Nikon D3 sample image, crops taken at upper left

      
Capture NX, Adobe Camera RAW, Iridient RAW Developer 1.7.1
Observe horizontal green stripes in Capture NX image at left