Hi,
They are worth it, especially if it saves you a hundreds dollars investment in tools.
On the other hand, think this way: Lightroom is not a raw converter - it is a
parametric workflow tool. Almost any tools you add breaks the
parametric word in the previous sentence.
In my view, Lightroom has a problem with demosaic on non OLP filtered raw files. All converters have problems as the file gets contaminated by artefacts before conversion. But some converters cover it up better. C1, RawTherapee, Iridient Raw Developer do a better job on this.
Regarding colour, I have done some testing and don't feel C1 is more accurate. But, C1 has more saturation by default.
With regard to colour, there is a great tool called Adobe DNG Profile Editor, it can both generate DCP Colour Profiles from a ColorChecker exposure but it also allows the user to tweak and adjust the resulting profile. The tool is absolutely free.
Another great way to improve colour is to use Anders Torger's DCamProf. This is no easy to use GUI-based tool, but Anders have done a great job in providing a very flexible and accurate tool for generating colour profiles from any target.
There is a great choice of presets for Lightroom, these offer convenience. Presets don't break parametric workflow and they don't do anything you cannot do yourself. It is just that someone has done a lot of job testing a lot of options and produced a set of presets.
Colour profiles have a tremendous effect on colour rendition. The samples at the link below is from a test I made using different profiles with my two main cameras at that time, a P45+ back and a Sony Alpha 99. Subject was chosen to be quite tricky, with chlorophyll greens and bluish purple. Last row shows "correct" colour samples that were measured with a spectrometer on the very same flower.
http://echophoto.dnsalias.net/ekr/Articles/OLS_OnColor/SimpleCase/If I want an image free of aliasing artefacts I would process it in RawTherapee into a 16 bit TIFF and process the TIFF in Lightroom. Raw Therapee cannot work miracles on aliasing, though, but so can no other program.
For large prints (like 70x100cm), I would probably bypass sharpening in Lightroom (or C1 for that part) and use FocusMagic on the unsharpened raw file and I may try some tools from Topaz Labs. But doing that I am definitively in TIFF territory.
Best regards
Erik
Best regards
Erik
Your links require a dollar a month subscription