I feel that DXO is not mentioned often enough here. DXO works very nicely together with LR and it works on raws. It seems to have the best noise reduction system when working with raws. It does a lot of good automatic improvement that of course always need some extra editing before finalizing. Final Color adjustments are better made back in LR as DXO seems not to be able to pass all color changes back to LR in a perfect way (at least not when passed back in a DNG which is a good choice if the starting format is a RAW, if JPEGs were passed to DXO, then tif will be good as format to return into LR.