Shooting Camera RAW - software review

Here’s something for you, camera junkies. I might be late to the party, but I’m shooting RAW-only nowadays and it’s a blast! On several occasions I’ve managed to rescue photos that seemed beyond all hope. I never thought RAW stores so much extra data over what’s visible. Cool

If you’re on RAW diet too do check out Adobe’s Lightroom. It’s probably the most complete package for managing your photos. Perfect for sorting through thousands of shots and great for editing them. Version 2 just came out recently and it looks even more promising.

I also tried:

• ACD See Pro 2.0 - quite nice, but slow (lot of disk trashing, slow rendering of RAW files) and, what’s worst, its Canon profiles were very poor and it gave all photos a weird, yellowish and overexposed treatment
• Canon’s own Digital Photo Professional 3.4.1 - as expected here the colors were correct but it was too clunky and lacking in many areas
• Capture One 4.1 - very good software, close to Lightroom’s quality. What annoyed me:
  • weird sharpness applied to photos which I weren’t able to tame
  • same thing with a blueish tinting
  • leaving temp and data files in every directory it touches, aargh!

There’s one more software a friend told me about - DxO Optics Pro. It’s supposed to be a little miracle worker. It recognizes your camera, lenses and photo parameters and then does the best job to automatically improve the picture. It sounds almost too good to be true. And the noise filtering results I saw were impressive. I need to check out this one too, soon.