Originally posted by K57XR For casual photography with the ideal shooting condition and camera setup, my K5 produces excellent jpeg images that I don't even bother with raw files. I use raw processors in general for special images only – mainly for printing or salvaging photos.
After having trouble getting satisfactory results with "problem" images using a particular RAW converter, I thought I'd try working on non-problematic images in order to come up with a baseline profile that I could use as
a starting point for the images where I really needed to use the RAW converter. I was using the camera JPGs as a "control" to evaluate how good a job I was doing. In addition to the bundled software, I've been using ACR via PSE, and I recently added
Rawtherapee to stable of converters I've been experimenting with. My goal is to settle on one converter and develop a reasonably fast workflow, as opposed to spending hours working on individual images.
I've usually convinced myself that converter X was my best bet, and then I would convert a series of photos using it. Afterwards, I'd go back and compare the results to the camera JPGs. Most of the time, just a minor tweak to the original camera JPG would
give a better looking result ( overall ) than what I got from the converter. With considerable effort, I might better the original JPG in one aspect ( eg. better local contrast ), but it was invariably at the expense of some other aspect ( eg. more noise ). There was always a tradeoff - whereas the camera JPG was often the best compromise, and very difficult to match using any of the RAW converters I tried ( the exception being PDCU, but the UI leaves something to be desired, and it doesn't work for my K30 files in any case ).
In frustration, I'd switch to a different converter, do another series, and come to the same conclusion. With certain problem images, I'd sometimes get better results with one converter vs another, and certainly some converters had advantages over
others in terms of workflow.
My personal preference is to NOT work with the "importation/cataloguing" type workflow, so I've confined my testing to Raw converters that I can invoke on a specific file that I'm looking at in my file browser ( FastStone ). I'd like to settle on one converter that I can use for RAW images from both my cameras, rather than have to switch converters all the time ( a frustrating aspect of using the bundled converters ). I've worked
with PSE/ACR, PDCU3 ( for K200D files ), and Silkypix 3 ( for my K30 files ) and more recently, Rawtherapee ( though I did work with RT and Lightroom back in 2009 when I first got my K200D ).