[biz-engineer]

What PP software best support Pentax K-3 and lenses? Ligthroom? DXO? Capture One?

[jatrax]

best support

Lightroom seems to be the quickest to update if you are using DNG. If you mean supporting new cameras. Other than that what do you mean by "support"? AFAIK they all work though I only use Lightroom and know about the others only from comments here. Some seem to prefer the RAW converter of one over another, personally I just stick with Lightroom for what I do. That plus the NIK plugins are all I have ever needed.

But everyone has specific priorities, for me organizing a large portfolio with title, caption and keywords take precedence over everything else and I would use LR for that even if I used a different RAW processor.

[rawr]

Ligthroom? DXO? Capture One?

I have ended up with all three on my computer. They all support K-3 fine. Each product is mature and very capable. I would be happy to rely on any one of them as my main RAW processor.

However each has their own strengths and features. Lightroom and DxO have the better lens profile support and noise reduction, Lightroom has the best cataloguing and image management features, C1 has very nice detail and rendering and supports more advanced PP options like layers.

Each has a free trial period download. Give them all a go, see which works for you. It's very much a matter of personal taste.

There is also RAWTherapee, if you want open source.

[biz-engineer]

Did you notice any difference in processing speed? Or are they equivalent?

[semaca]

RawTherapee looks fun, but Lightroom maybe it's the best. The thing I don't like about the DNG file is the size. It is huge!

[rawr]

Or are they equivalent?

Depends on what you mean by processing

Speed of importing a folder full of images and rendering standard previews? All three are OK. Speed of sorting and culling 1000 freshly imported event photos? Lightroom by a mile. Dynamic processing of working changes (eg as you move the sliders around while working on an image)? C1, DxO, LR. Speed of processing an image into an export format (eg saving to TIFF or JPEG)? C1, DxO, LR.

Each can have a different working 'speed'. Sometimes that has nothing to do with the programming speed. I find Lightroom, for example, the fastest program for sorting, rating, culling, and then processing big jobs where I may need to process 1000 event DNG's in one sitting, simply because LR is designed to support that kind of workflow.

But generally I would rate their program speed as:
1. C1
2. DxO
3. LR

But, once again, it depends: on what processing you have done (NR, lots of spot adjustments etc), whether the image is a big file-size high-ISO shot, and so on.

DxO and I think C1 also can offload some processing to your GPU (CUDA if you have an NVidia card), which does potentially speed things up. Lightroom (as yet) ignores the GPU, but v6 of LR will apparently support using GPU horsepower better.

tl;dr - you need to try them out on your computer. How you work will also shape your perception of speed.

[rrstuff]

I think the fastest-processing software is Google Picasa but it's very rudimentary. I like C1 for image quality, Lightroom for convenience and Photoshop for large edits.

Old C1 had trouble with supporting Pentax RAW - it didn't render colors properly. They wanted me to buy a new version to support the K-30, which was a bit annoying.

[redcat]

LR is a perfect tool for me, it pairs well with Photoshop so I can easily switch between the two. the file size is always an incovenient though