[fotoreporter1975]

I was talking with a guy on a forum about what raw converter one should use and why, so I thought that this my old (a few months) test was worth sharing.

It's a 5 parts post with 100% crops - may be useful to someone else in his situation. I compared against each other almost all the raw converters available then. They were: Apple Preview, Canon Digital Photo Professional, CaptureOne 6, Corel AfterShot, DCRaw, DXO Optics, Gimp, Lightroom 3, PerfectRaw, Photoshop 5, RawTherapee, Rawker, RawDeveloper, RawPhotoProcessor, UFRaw.

Review: Raw Converters Mega Test part I
Review: Raw Converters Mega Test part II
Review: Raw Converters Mega Test part III
Review: Raw Converters Mega Test part IV
Review: Raw Converters Mega Test part V

And then I found another interesting one, free for Apple users with the Developers pack:

Review: Core Image Fun House

Hope this helps. Happy pictures everyone

[JohnBee]

While I certainly admire the amount of work and determination required to write such a comprehensive and demanding review, much of the presentation seems obscured by the challenges of what I'd like to call the personal threshold. ie. on my screen, the sharpening looks highly overcooked and/or out of sorts with respect to radius and amount settings.

Sorry if this sounds overly critical, that's wasn't my intent. Though I couldn't help but feel this way after going through the numerous samples.

Whatever the case, it clearly takes a very committed person to follow through with such a comprehensive and challenging review. And so there's that to consider.

[fotoreporter1975]

While I certainly admire the amount of work and determination required to write such a comprehensive and demanding review, much of the presentation seems obscured by the challenges of what I'd like to call the personal threshold. ie. on my screen, the sharpening looks highly overcooked and/or out of sorts with respect to radius and amount settings.

Sorry if this sounds overly critical, that's wasn't my intent. Though I couldn't help but feel this way after going through the numerous samples.

Whatever the case, it clearly takes a very committed person to follow through with such a comprehensive and challenging review. And so there's that to consider.

I over-sharpened intentionally the files a bit in the 3rd and 4th part, to make the differences between raw converters more visible. But if you want to see the unsharpened crops you should look at the 1st part.

Criticism is welcome but keep in mind that you're looking at a really small portion of a large print!

Btw, more than committed that day I was bored to death because, after an hour and a half drive, the light was awful; so I decided to make this test just to not completely waste the day.

[emalvick]

Interesting posts and results... It's amazing what the eye sees. I didn't necessarily agree with your conclusions on each page just because of the subjective nature of what looks good.

It's really tough to evaluate when other items are varying a bit from image to image... most noticeably the contrast.

Overall, it is a nice look at the various programs. Very few of us have that variety of software available to us. Real world examples are often better than the cooked up ones that get presented generally around the internet. My only comment is that there is much more to RAW processors than sharpening.

In my own experiences with 3 raw processors, I find that I can generally get the sharpening I want with the right amount of effort. My own selection of RAW software was more revolved around a complete package and the ease of use of the overall program. I find myself working with wb, exposure (brightness, curves), and color the most. Based on the features I had desired, I had purchased Silkypix and LR back a few years ago... However, just based on ease of use, I ended up exclusively using LR. Rawtherapee is my goto when I can't get what I want out of LR, but I am not a huge fan of its interface and it lacks a couple of features I'd like. It does thrive in terms of sharpening, although I still think it needs help with noise reduction, which obviously goes hand and hand with sharpening.

By the way, I like the photo you used. Beautiful shot.

[fotoreporter1975]

It's really tough to evaluate when other items are varying a bit from image to image... most noticeably the contrast.

You're right, trying to "equalize" the contrast among so many different softwares proved to be tougher than I thought. In the end I noticed we both ended up with the same combo, Lightroom for the bulk of the work and RawTherapee for the tricky cases!

At this two I add Raw Photo Processor for the shots made with the Nex-3 at high iso (it does wonders) and Rawker for the Fuji X100 (it gives me pictures with the same beautiful colors of the Fuji jpgs, but much sharper).

And thanks for the compliment, I'm glad you liked the shot I used for the review; I hate it! It was the only half-baked picture that I was able to not trash after an entire day spent in a gloomy, grey light. Lucky for me I came back a week later and the light was much better.