Just launched: Photo Ninja

[G*]

I played around with the trial version of Photo Ninja for some days and in general I am very happy with what I see. The results are positively different from what other raw converters could do for me until now. The highlight-color recovery, though, looks pretty underwhelming on my D800E files (compared to RPP, that is). Will I buy a licence for PN? Probably yes, soon. It will give me the feeling of supporting a sympathetic start-up business and at the same time being entitled (as a stake holder) to write them long mails with complaints give them feedback on possible improvements. 

[kers]

I bought PN at launch and thought it very good but continued to use ACR mostly out of familiarity and of course it is not bad. When I processed my first Ricoh GR DNG in ACR I was disappointed in the result. There was a lot of CA and loss of detail. After a run through PN it was a whole new image. All of the IQ I had read about was there and beautiful and it took very little effort to get it there. There have been other lenses that were a CA struggle in ACR that came out good in PN with the automatic settings. I am a little disappointed that I am paying for an upgrade already but at least it is not expensive. I think they may have a stealth subscription sales model. I have to say that it is worth every cent.

I also bought PN some time ago. I like the different approach that sometimes leads to a better developed NEF ( d800). But on the whole i must say i like ACR more ( CS6 version). Using both gives me enough choices to get a good result.
It is interesting to see that corner sharpness can be very different with the two. sometimes ACR is better and sometimes PN... the highlight recovery is a weak point in PN - I think it should stop working when there is no data instead of trying to guess what could have been there...