| I have worked with Bibble (and still do sometimes), PhaseOne and Lightroom, ACR and ofcourse tried the Pentax Software.
The Pentax Software is not bad and I would use it, if I was to convert some holiday snopy now and then. PhaseOne was great, but got somewhat aged, compared to Lightroom. The current version 4.2 seems to be much better, but doesn't run under Mac OS X 10.4 (and I refuse to uzpgrade to 10.5), so it is out of the game for me. Bibble is a really good package which is quite fast and produces very good results. it comes bundles with good noise reduction plug-ins etc.
ACR is capable. but really a stumbling stone when it comes to large numbers of files. This is the reason, why I finally settled with Lightroom. The current 2.x version is just amazing. The very limited number of editing tools is very well implemented and I am wondering how I ever coped without the gradient mask. Also, its catalogueing and indexing functionality is quite competent.
I switched from being a Photoshop/ACR user most of the time to being a 90% Lightrrom user and only use Photoshop, when I need layers and masks and more local image manipulation.
Ben |