I had the privilege of being a presenter on Andrew Rodney's Iron Chef's panel at Photo Plus Expo in New York City several weeks ago. The bulk of the session was about displaying the use of four raw converters in real-time on images provided by two world-famous photographers. Dennis Reggie and Vincent LeForet provided the images, and representatives of Lightroom, Bibble, Aperture and Phase worked these images using their software under the supervision of the two photographers. One could watch the images developing in real-time on a huge screen, and Epson provided a 3800 printer with Super A3 Premium Luster paper for printing the results. Importantly, the session was not structured to pick winners or losers, but simply to show the state-of-the-art with four of the key raw converters. The images were very challenging (on purpose) and the two photographers were truly impressed with the quality of all the converters. They all work in different ways, they have different user interfaces, and the adjustments made to the same image accross the four applications were not exactly the same, so after examining some of the prints I cam away with the impression that all this software is very good, the more controlling factors being the skill and preferences of the user. By the way, all of them have free trial downloads, so you can try before you buy.
