Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Forget about JPEGs. You should be working with raw files, editing your photos at their most molecular level. We compare five raw image-conversion and editing apps that promise to take your photography to a higher plane of awesomeness."

Curious about what raw processing software you should use? The gang at Maximum PC has pulled together a few of the top options - although it's curious they ignored DXO Optics - and compared them to one another. It's a decent set of mini-reviews, though when the author stated that you can change ISO and shutter speed settings in a raw file, it put his article off to a bad start...I don't think he's someone who shoots or edits raw files regularly.

What do you use to process raw files? I'm still using Lightroom 2; it's one of the best pieces of software I've used, though I really wish it had automatic lens correction - that was one of my favourite things about DXO Optics.

Oh, and if you're curious, that's raw salmon in the photo above.

"While camera manufacturers keep competing for high ISO performance, DxO Labs now offers the image processing technologies which are critical to delivering top-notch image quality from such extreme ISO shots. In low-light conditions, photographers must choose between using low ISO and risking unnatural flash lighting or camera shake, or using high ISO settings with its typical image noise and loss of colors and details. But now, thanks to a new technological approach, DxO Optics Pro 6 sets a new bar for RAW conversion: photographers can push their cameras to the ISO limits and even beyond - as much as one to two stops above their usual ISO settings! - and still get great photos without any noticeable loss in image quality."

When I first started shooting raw a few years ago with my DSLR, I looked at a bunch of different raw processing software packages. With my experiments using Photoshop Elements and the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in, it quickly became obvious that processing images one by one, completely in isolation of each other, was a rather poor approach. I looked at several packages on the market, but spent the most time with Lightroom 1.0 and DxO Optics Pro 4.5. While there were several things I really liked about the DxO software, specifically the lens-based optics correction (I'm ticked Lightroom still lacks that) and the killer multi-threading, I found the user interface cumbersome to use. So have things gotten any better with version 5.0? I spent a few minutes looking at the press information, which is rife with competitive info, to find out. Read more...