New from Nik Bhatt at Gentlemen Coders (
https://gentlemencoders.com/). This is a 'free' update to the first generation of RP, available from the Mac App store.
I’ve been using RP occasionally as a Mac OS Photos (ie. iPhoto) “extension” editor. The new version 2.0 will do that, too, as well as work in ‘stand-alone’ mode and as a LR Classic plugin. The things I like are the speed of the editor, a full set of Raw processing global adjustments that work well together and good-behaviour (so far as I can tell) when working with raw files in the LR catalog.
The raw development has two ‘stages’: one for the raw demosaicing incl. raw contrast and input-sharpening and a second development stage for global processing. It will save images transferred via the LR plugin as TIFFs in the catalog or save its own sidecar/adjustments file in the user Library folder (so the raw image itself is untouched) when it processes a raw file selected from its own very speedy file browser in stand-alone mode. Usual export options. There is a useful batch processor in the new version and batch exporting, too.
This is not a full-service photo-editor. There are no local adjustments: nothing requiring brushes or gradients. Crop, perspective and ‘straighten’ rotations are available. But there is no spot correction or in-fill/patching. Final sharpening (luminance channel) is a simple slider; no radius/intensity controls (that said, I didn’t fault the global sharpening of my Olympus OMD EM-1 raws).
The new browser is very quick and tabbed for multiple views of your storage. It displays a selection of Exif data for the selected image. But I can’t find any way to rate/flag/star images. You can define ‘favourite’ folders of images.
There are what look like hiccups: e.g. the ‘crop and straighten’ controls don’t seem to work well in Photos.
This is a capable, low-cost, sort-of-familiar editor that is nicely thought-through for what it does: which in this version is not as much as the Photos raw editor, if you take in to account the latter's ‘auto’ adjustments, ‘retouch’, ‘levels’ and more detailed sharpening controls (etc).
But if you prefer not to use the Photos database and you reach the stage of deciding the only way to cope with the large number of raws you have process is to do as little as possible and move on, this editor is a nice choice.
