Originally posted by Marc Sabatella First, the kind of software I'm talking abut doesn't force you to convert to JPEG at all - you continue to work with your original RAW files.
What software product(s) are you talking about specifically?
Originally posted by Marc Sabatella The Pentax software basically forces you to convert to JPEG and then you're done. No going back except to start over and convert again.
You can save your settings, reload them and start modifying again. However, I agree this should be automated for each individual picture (instead of requiring a manual save of the settings).
Originally posted by Marc Sabatella No applying settings in batches except to uses the *exact* same settings for all
Unless one uses the same settings for all, batch processing doesn't seem to make sense. For individual settings, you just do them one by one, right?
I could imagine that one would like to set individual parameters for a set of images respectively and then do a batch conversion of all. But then you seem to suggest that this latter batch conversion isn't necessary since you do not want to go to JPEGs anyhow. I'm also assuming you would rather have real time processing, so you'd be done after choosing the right settings?
Sorry, just trying to understand your workflow.
BTW, regarding the strange "K10D" JPEG->RAW processing being inferior to the "K100D" JPEG->RAW processing: I've come across this interesting interview of K10D engineers:
OK1000 Pentax Blog: K10D Interview with development engineers of Pentax Japan
It appears that they had to go rather different ways because of the new K10D sensor. I reckon they couldn't just reuse the image processing of the K100D firmware given the different sensor characteristics. The blog pointed to above also features user voices which call the K10D JPEGS "soft".
At
Unices.org Blog Archive Pentax K10d, how to make jpg files ?
you can compare crops of JPEG vs various RAW engines. Pixel peep at the left rear light within the 100% crops. You'll notice almost no detail in the JPEG and the best detail in the Raw Therapee version. I'd be the first to concede that the above comparison probably wasn't done with scientific rigour (the JPEG and the PhotoLaboratory versions are oversharpened, notice the halo at the edge of the car) but the results are consistent with what I've read elsewhere.