Interesting. Perhaps the platform has something to do with it. Maybe Silkypix is better on a PC. As a Mac user, I'm sticking with PS plus camera raw now as well, but plan to look at lightroom. Like you, I can work very quickly in PhotoShop, so that alone is a huge advantage. Paul On Jan 7, 2007, at 5:35 PM, Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote:
> 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 -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
