Adobe Camera Raw Enhance Details Continues to Frustrate: Stripes Over Entire Image
Woe to the photographer who uses Adobe Camera Raw Enhance Details to process raw files into DNG and then discards the originals—permanent baked-in stripes with no going back.
I’ve been a fan of Enhance Details, but I have now largely abandoned it, because while it improves sharpness and reduces moiré and color aliasing, the side effect of stripes covering the entire image is a cure far worse than the disease.
At this point, I get the feeling that Adobe is not taking the issue seriously: I’ve provided multiple examples and I know the developer has those examples. Yet I’ve heard not a peep as to whether there is any hope of a fix, or (perhaps) whether Enhance Details is inherently flawed at least with raw files from some (most) cameras.
Enhance Details is even worse with frame averaging because the more noise is reduced, the more visible the striped line overlay becomes (as random noise is removed, latent patterns become plain to see).
Below, the striped lines do NOT appear without Enhance Details. The lines are more or less visible depending on the subject matter detail and brightness but cover the image in its entirety
Here, the image was shot in landscape orientation, and the stripes are primarily vertical. As I understand it, this seems to rule some kind of sensor inter-row differential issue, since the rows of the sensor are horizontal. However, the overall pattern is more of a grid than just unidirectional, so that leads me to believe it is iterative image processing that is introducing the pattern.
