I compared Silkypix, RAW Developer, Photoshop CS2 + Camera Raw, Lightroom and LightZone (all on Mac OS X, of course: I have no Windows boxes) by taking the same PEF file, rendering it out to a DNG and processing both the PEFs (Silkypix and RAW Developer) and the DNGs (all of them) to a final rendering with no further edit manipulations. No sharpening or noise reduction was applied in any of them. I then printed them all with Photoshop CS2 using my standard print workflow to an A3 print and compared them.
- I hated using Silkypix. Worst user interface of the batch... I worked hard at it, put a day's work in to learn it and barely achieved what I thought was a passable result. - RAW Developer was much more accommodating and took me about 20 minutes from install to creating what I felt was a pretty good rendering. - I know Photoshop/Camera Raw very well so I felt I had a decent rendering with that in about 5 minutes work. - Lightroom I've been working with off and on for the past month and it surprised me: with the same DNG file, it took about 1 minute's worth of corrections to make what I thought was a good rendering. - Lightroom took about 20 minutes to install and become familiar enough with to get something done that I felt was presentable. I didn't do any work wth Pentax Photo Browser/Lab other than to convert the PEF file to DNG because it is almost entirely unusable and unstable on my computer. Junk. On the printouts, to my surprise, the one created with Lightroom looked the best, followed by Photoshop, followed closely by RAW Developer and LightZone, and trailed distantly by Silkypix. My K10D is now set semi-permanently to RAW/DNG format capture. I'm still working my images with Photoshop + Camera Raw as my production base, but Lightroom is an up and coming in my book. I just need to figure out some of the more complex automation things that I do with my photos to adopt it as my RAW converter of choice, and of course that cannot happen until it is a full Golden Master release. Godfrey -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
