Originally posted by zkarj The price seems a little steep — full price will be USD$129 — but at launch (until 31st May) you can get it for USD$89.99 which for what it achieves I reckon is a fair price. My workflow would be to have PureRAW pull the files directly from the card and output to their final resting place on disk before opening them in the processing tool of choice.
Had I determined I would switch processing software, I would absolutely have purchased. But as I already own PhotoLab 4 which already has this capability (exporting the Linear DNG with only NR and lens/camera correction) I will just use that for any experimentation with other tools.
The price is the thing that struck me. It's cheaper, but not significantly so for the amount of features lost compared to PhotoLab 4. Based on your recommendation, I took advantage of the PhotoLab 4 30 day trial, then ended up purchasing it after putting it through its paces. I waited till the 'Black Friday' sale, and I think it was 50% off the regular price, so reasonably affordable.
For probably around 80% of my photos, Light Room is perfectly adequate as I typically shoot at base ISO, and noise is not really an issue.
There are several areas where I find PhotoLab 4 is great; noise reduction when it's needed, automatic lens profile correction, and control points for selective lighting adjustment. Although Lightroom has radial filter and adjustment brush, I find control points in PhotoLab are typically a lot more useful, and less likely to end up with undesirable artefacts along edges. Of course I could use control points with Nik Effects but that was not a non-destructive process, and if I wanted to go back and change and edit, I'd have to start over, whereas with PhotoLab, I can just bring up the image and tweak adjustments.
I think rather than being a Lightroom replacement, in my case, PhotoLab has ended up becoming a replacement for most of what I was doing in Nik Effects, although there are some of those plugins I'll still use occasionally, raw sharpening and lighting adjustments for situations too complicated for Lightroom were the main reason I'd use Nik plugins.
Apart from allowing me to work non-destructively on raw files, PhotoLab saves me a heap of disk space compared to Nik, because it saves its edits as small sidecar files, and I'm quite happy exporting just jpgs back to Lightroom, as I still have the original raw file in my catalog, and I can easily make adjustments and export them again from PhotoLab. Previously, If I wanted to send something to Nik from Lightroom, I'd end up with a massive tif file in addition to the original raw file, and as already mentioned, the edits to this file were destructive, as I couldn't revert edits in Nik once saved. Nik does have some effects that go beyond what PhotoLab can achieve, but a lot of those additional effects can be pretty over the top, and getting more into the realm of redefining an image as something different to what it originally represented. Silver Efex Pro might be one I'd consider for monochrome conversion, although Lightroom offers adequate options for this in most cases.