I normally just use Lightroom for processing my images, with refinement in Photoshop, transferring the small proportion of processed images to web galleries.
Earlier today, I was trying to process some high ISO images and after a lot of fiddling around with the sliders got something that was OK, but which I felt could be bettered.
I have tried a number of other raw processors, but they are not uniformly superior and Lightroom is very good for sorting through your pics. It also provides hassle-free lens profile correction, straightening, selective adjustments and healing, for example.
Today I tried a processor that I had not played with before, Iridient Developer. It produced better colour, sharpening and much better noise reduction, even at default settings. It could use the Adobe .lcp lens corrections, but its chromatic aberration correction was much less successful that ACR. I also missed the ability to paint out small distractions.
However, what struck me most was how painful it was to find the pictures that I wanted to edit and then to reintegrate the result into my workflow. It was like going back 10 years.
I have found myself using Adobe Lightroom mobile much more that I thought I would, when I first played with it. (It helps that the iPad flatters pictures.). Interestingly Apple is about to ship Photos, which makes the workflow even slicker. All that syncing in Lightroom mobile never seems to work quite as smoothly as it demonstrates. (The Microsoft problem, if you like.). Google has a similar facility with Google+. What all these models have in common is that you end up renting (storage, in the case of Apple and Google, and software and storage in the case of Adobe.)
It is good that we have several competitors, at least two of which have very deep pockets. (Microsoft is also offering cloud services , but they are aimed more at businesses.)
What does this trend mean? I think that it means that the more specialised, potentially higher quality, conversion software will struggle (DXO, Capture One, the Corel product). Similarly the more experimental converters (Iridient, Raw Picture Processor, Photo Ninja, etc) and the open source ones (Raw Therapee, etc) will become increasingly hard to use (lots and lots of sliders and unfinished features) and fall into the tomb that niches so oten become. (Or they'll get bought out for their IP, as NikSoftware was, for example.). There could, of course, be some room for software that is part of a professional workflow, rather than a consumer one, just as medium format remains alive. But will the arguably superior rendering of Capture One win the day over the workflow ease of Adobe's tools? Look at the way in which you can send adjusted raw files to Photoshop as SmartObjects, in the latest versions, for example.
The lesson from this, for me, is that I need to take even more care with my photography (and spend more on higher quality sensors and lenses
), because, good as ACR is, the engineers will always have to err on the side of conservatism or mediocrity (depending on your perspective) to make the tool simpler to use and so appeal to a wider user base. (The same applies to Apple and Google, in spades.)
Anyway, enough of this pontificating. I must go and take some pictures.
