What do you use for RAW conversion?

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What is your RAW convertor?

  • DXO PhotoLab

  • Lightroom

  • Capture One

  • ACDSee

  • On1 Photo RAW

  • Photoshop

  • Darktable

  • Other (mention in comments

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raptor photo

raptor photo

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Interested in seeing what everyone uses for their photo editing. If you use more than one for RAW conversion (The first part of editing, not the pixel editing step), just pick the one you use the most. And feel free to chime in on the reasons that you picked them!
 
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I ingest my images into LrC and do the culling, keywording and initial evaluation there. Most shots are also processed there with other processing done in DxO PL 6, Photoshop, Nik Collection depending on how I think the image should end up.

Just upgraded to PL7 and Nik Collection 6.
 
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I use Lightroom Classic - with my Preferences/Presets set to use Camera Settings. This allows me to use the Nikon provided settings for noise reduction, Active D-lighting, and sharpening as a starting point. It also gives me Nikon's version of color as rendered by LR.

I use a number of products occasionally - probably 1-2% of my edits. The front end of my workflow but occasionally to render a JPEG is Photo Mechanic. PM uses the embedded JPEG in the NEF file - the same thing you see on the camera's LCD. With problem images, sometimes I'll give Nikon NX Studio a try. It can make a difference if I am having a problem with WB or getting a good conversion. On occasion, I'll also use Topaz Photo AI if I have an image that needs extra attention in terms of sharpening or noise reduction. Topaz is particularly good when I need to show lots of detail. I usually get good results in LR, but starting over with RAW conversion can help if I am using Photo AI. Finally, occasionally I do convert images in Photoshop, and while it uses Adobe Camera Raw as the engine, it can be a little different from my results in LR and later converting to PS.
 
These days I've been using DXO via Lightroom for images that might be keepers, otherwise Lightroom.
 
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Mostly Capture One, with occasional forays into Photolab. C1 does everything from importing and renaming, to raw conversion and editing. It's not the most intuitive to learn, and the noise reduction isn't the best, but overall it suits me. I like the colours, and the detail it pulls out of images, but now that they're going to a subscription model I have been investigating Photolab more seriously.
 
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raptor photo said:
Interested in seeing what everyone uses for their photo editing. If you use more than one for RAW conversion (The first part of editing, not the pixel editing step), just pick the one you use the most. And feel free to chime in on the reasons that you picked them!
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I think you're asking about raw conversion only, and not all the other things that happen during ingest, culling, etc. But I'm not sure... "uses for photo editing" is a much broader question than "What do you use for RAW conversion?" The raw conversion is a critical initial step in post processing.

btw raw conversion in both Lr and Ps use the same ACR engine.

I use Ps to access ACR with a custom LUT/camera profile made from a Calibrite colorchecker (much better than any of the Adobe default LUTs imo). Hope that's helpful - Cheers!
 
Something new in DXO Photolab 7 is the ability to use the color checker passport and similar to generate a custom profile. That helped push me over the brink from Lightroom to Photolab.
 
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I use Photoshop as I dislike LR and similar applications that require loading files and adding meta data as a first step. I want to sort and cull images before doing any image editing.

I understand why the developers of LR chose to use the film to print process metaphorically but having shot and developed and worked with film for decades prior to getting my first digital camera, I do not find it useful but rather cumbersome when dealing with large quantities of files from a day of shooting.

I was using Affinity but the company has not bothered to make the changes to allow Nikon compressed file import. Affinity is the best third party application when it comes to working with my old PSD and TIFF files that contain layers.
 
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I use NX Studio. Nikon knows how to read its own file formats and can keep up with the changes therein. I have been fully satisfied with the program as a first step editor. I don't tend to process massive numbers of photos, so I am not inconvenienced by its relative slowness.
 
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raptor photo said:
Just curious, if you have DXO and affinity why do you use Photos?
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I only use Affinity Photo and DXO when I need to remove noise. Affinity photo also has a feature called Inpainting which very easily removes objects like a tree branch, a piece of grass, etc very easily from the photo. Except for DXO, I do everything on my ipad. Apple photos on the iPad can remove noise but it makes the photo too soft. The other features of Apple photos are a joy to use and I can comfortably review and edit my photos very quickly. It’s not as powerful as LR or the other Apps but I’m not interested in getting that deeply into all that. At least not yet. The only aspect thats missing for the Apple Photo app is masking. Affinity Photo can do that but I haven’t found much of a need for that. If I do I will usually do it on my computer.
If you have all Apple products, it’s also great because you can transfer images to all your devices by using airdrop. No wires , etc, just select your images and click and there on your phone or computer
 
raptor photo said:
Do you have to keep extra DNGs to use DXO via LR? Is it a simple process in general? I'm deliberating buying into Adobe and using DXO from in there.
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It depends on your workflow. DXO only works on raw files. I send the raw to Photolab from lightroom and it returns me back to lightroom with the dng. So you now have the original raw and the DNG in lightroom. From there I keep the raw but work on the dng. I end up in photoshop, so in theory i could discard the dng since it is a layer in photoshop, but I keep it just in case. Storage is cheap these days, but the dng files are probably huge.

You better have a reasonably modern computer with at least a fair GPU. I had a problem with an outdated driver for my graphics card, so DXO was working only from the CPU. It took 9 minutes per photo to run deep prime XD using the CPU only. Once the driver was corrected the same file took 1 minute 18 seconds. Still there is some waiting time but with Photolab you can keep working in lightroom on other files while it is spinning.

Even if the file is not noisy I like the lens corrections part of DXO and the way the colors are rendered in DXO. If you don't run the deep prime noise reduction, just do the regular denoise, it doesn't take as long, maybe 30 seconds.
 
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bleirer said:
It depends on your workflow. DXO only works on raw files. I send the raw to Photolab from lightroom and it returns me back to lightroom with the dng. So you now have the original raw and the DNG in lightroom. From there I keep the raw but work on the dng. I end up in photoshop, so in theory i could discard the dng since it is a layer in photoshop, but I keep it just in case. Storage is cheap these days, but the dng files are probably huge.

You better have a reasonably modern computer with at least a fair GPU. I had a problem with an outdated driver for my graphics card, so DXO was working only from the CPU. It took 9 minutes per photo to run deep prime XD using the CPU only. Once the driver was corrected the same file took 1 minute 18 seconds. Still there is some waiting time but with Photolab you can keep working in lightroom on other files while it is spinning.

Even if the file is not noisy I like the lens corrections part of DXO and the way the colors are rendered in DXO. If you don't run the deep prime noise reduction, just do the regular denoise, it doesn't take as long, maybe 30 seconds.
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Thanks! Why do you find the need to use LR at all then? Is it better tone tools, or just a better workflow?
 
raptor photo said:
Thanks! Why do you find the need to use LR at all then? Is it better tone tools, or just a better workflow?
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For sure the library part of lightroom is top notch and I like the Lightroom tools. I always end up in photoshop to finish anyway, so in theory photolab could do the whole job of raw conversion if I knew it as well as I do lightroom.
 
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