raw developer part one

April 2006 (other articles)

Part One

This is a three part article. (Update: more recent writing about Raw Developer here). Each part has its own conclusion, because each part deals with an aspect that is independent of the others. To decide whether this product is for you, you will have to read at least parts one and three. Part two is of interest to people wanting to do lots of monochrome conversions. However, if you want a rapid conclusion, then.......buy it. Until now I have been using Capture One Pro. This has been the best raw converter for my needs. Raw Developer is at least as good, although, as you will read it is different rather than better. Ideally you would have access to both, but Raw Developer is cheaper.

A disclaimer

I don't claim to know much about the technology behind raw conversion software. I am a user, not an engineer. I don't claim to have tested many competing products. I use Capture One because I got bored with the arcane methodology in Adobe Camera Raw and because I then bought a Phase One digital back that is not supported by Adobe. I also use a Mac which means that I miss out on the consumer market converters which are all written for the Windows platform. You can argue about whether or not Capture One is the best. What you can't deny is that it sets a very high benchmark for any comparison.

I have bought my own copy of Raw Developer (v 1.4.7). I have been in contact with the Iridient Digital during the preparation of this article, but I owe them nothing. I was very pleased that when I asked them a number of technical questions, I not only got answers, but I got personal attention from "the creator of RAW Developer and the president of Iridient Digital".

No raw developer will entirely replace Photoshop. However, I take the view that the more editing that you do on the raw file the better it is. This is partly a technical decision based upon my understanding of what happens when you fix a file as a .tif or .jpg, and partly an aversion to the sheer complexity of using Photoshop. With Capture One I was able to do most things I wanted to do to most files without taking them into Photoshop, and I was able to do them faster, more simply, and on the raw data. With Raw Developer I have found that I can do virtually everything I want to do to nearly every file without going into Photoshop (which has just become an expensive resizing tool for most images). You still need Photoshop if you want to do complex local adjustments using layers and masks. This probably only applies to 1 in 10 or fewer images for me.

Index

Part one is an introduction and deals with workflow.

Part two deals with monochrome conversions.

Part three deals with the quality of the output (i.e. the actual raw conversion).

Introduction

Raw Developer (RD from here on) is a Mac only developer of digital camera raw files. Over 100 cameras are supported and the list is both wider and more up to date than either Adobe Camera Raw or Capture One. It costs USD 100 from Iridient Digital. This price includes 15 months of updates, major and minor. The website allows downloads of fully functioning demonstration copies which mark the resulting output files with a licence notice which is obvious enough to make the resulting images unusable, but discreet enough to allow the images to be assessed for quality.

	I tested this file because I had recently created a version that I was happy with that had gone through Capture One. I wanted to see how easy it was to create something similar. Answer? No problems. See the original in context here.

Why workflow is important

You will be using a raw converter either as a hobby or to earn a living. If the former, you want the experience to be pleasant. If the latter, you want it to be efficient. These two requirements give remarkably similar results. Capture One has long been pushed as the raw converter that got workflow right, so for this section I will be comparing RD only with Capture One. That I would even consider doing so should be regarded as an enormous compliment to RD.

I find comparing a piece of software with which I am not familiar, to one that I have used for a long time, a challenge. Inevitably the familiar feels 'right'. Some of my questions to Iridient Digital got responses along the lines of 'it is in the menu under x', and probably got a sigh of frustration as well. Such is life.

The basic look and feel of RD approaches Capture One, but with a few raw edges. I expect that Apple's Aperture looks the best from what I've seen in the screen shots, but RD provides a good uncluttered working space that is highly adaptable. No matter what size or shape of screen you work on you should be able to place the main screen, the thumbnails and the tools in a way which suits you.

RD opens quickly and you can load either single images or folders, including folders with sub-folders. You will be working on your images whilst Photoshop is still telling you who it is grateful to. Loading the images is much quicker than with Capture One because nothing is being written back to disk at this point (whereas Capture One creates a settings file for every image regardless of whether you are likely to want to keep or process every image).

As you would expect, RD recognises the camera in use and loads each image against the default settings for this camera. And this is where neat trick number one comes. You can easily change the default settings for a given camera (and, yes, there is a one click return to factory settings option if you make a mistake). This has great implications for working in monochrome that I'll deal with in part two, but for the moment you might imagine that you have a digicam with a noisy sensor and your 'real' camera with the ultimate in noise free digital capture. Within a few seconds you can customise RD such that the digicam files always open with noise reduction on and the 'real' camera's files open with it off.

That may sound like a mild convenience, but the same facility can be used to customise much more fundamental settings. Say that after 10,000 images you have decided that you disagree with the software designer's assessment of the shape of the tone curve in the green channel that needs to be applied to every image. Well, you can change it, and without influencing the settings for the digicam at the same time. This is pretty sophisticated stuff and very easy to do.

Once you have the thumbnails open you select one to work on and get it to appear in the main window. This is where we hit two minor snags. The first is that browsing between images is a mouse operation, whereas I find it more efficient to use the keyboard for image selection and the mouse for tool selection. Nothing major but a snag, nonetheless (update). The second snag is that although I found the order in which the software expects you to work through the tools to be logical, the one place that it breaks down is that the crop and rotate tools are in the final pane. I often want these tools first. Capture One gets around this problem by putting them in the toolbar, and thus taking them out of the workflow. RD only has the 90 degree rotations similarly available.

There are six tool panes:

- In: this deals with exposure, colour space and white balance, and half hidden tools to allow you to adjust the settings for the processing of the raw data before the profiles are applied.

- B&W: allows monochrome conversions. I'll write more about this in part two.

- Curves: access to tone curves

- Adj: other ways to adjust the tone curves and hue, saturation and tint sliders

- SharpNR: tools for sharpening and noise reduction

- Out: tools related to the final output, including the crop and rotate functions

All fairly neat and logical. In fact, with the exception of the crop and rotate tools, I wouldn't reorder anything. I do flick back and forward between the curves and adj panes quite a lot, but as they interact this is only to be expected.

As everything is good, I'm not going to go through it all button by button, but I will highlight the best and worst bits.

The white balance tool is excellent. One click sampling, provided presets and user created presets. Nothing could be simpler.

The exposure compensation is less good (remember we are only talking workflow and efficiency here). You have to open the histogram window separately and the clipping warnings are menu items. Iridient Digital have told me that the clipping warnings will go onto the toolbar with the next update.

Overall, not quite as good as Capture One, but improving.

Curves

An excellent implementation. You can work in RGB, R, G, B, Lightness, a or b channels (or more than one). The point selection and deselection is high quality and the preview is excellent.

Overall, better than Capture One

	This photograph is from a series where the sharpening is critical. It was used as one of the tests of the actual conversions. More on this in part three.

Adj

By themselves these sliders would be a bit ho hum. As an addition to the already excellent curves they are great. For example, one of the problems with curves can be that you try to do too many things on one curve. Trying to add contrast and lighten the darker regions of a picture pulls the curve in opposite directions. The solution here is to do the lightening in the curves pane and add the contrast with the slider in the adj pane. It works.

The other sliders do their job.

Overall, a nice bonus.

SharpNR

On, off, amount and type. Couldn't be simpler. Time also to mention that the help file is also helpful. Not a full book's worth, but better than Capture One.

Overall, good. Going on great.

Out

Not much here, except crop and rotate, other than the 'go' button, and one marked 'send to batch' that I initially ignored. If you find the batch window you will find lots of useful stuff for automatically renaming files as they are processed as well as dpi output, file location and format commands. Set these to your preferences and then use the batch command to process images.

The rotate command does not crop the image to ensure that the resulting file stays within image boundary.

Overall, not bad.

Overview

A few other observations. If you have selected a tool it stays selected. Selecting a second tool lays this on top of the first such that deselecting the second tool brings back the first. This takes a while to get used to. Tool selection is going to be added to the toolbar in a future version, I'm told.

At the end of editing you can save the edit settings easily. This means that you will have three files. The original raw file, the processed file and a single file containing the set of instructions of how to get from one to the other. This is how is should be. Excellent.

	And this one was chosen because it is fun. Nothing wrong with these colours.

Conclusion

I don't suppose that I have uncovered all the shortcuts or the quirks of the software by any means. I do know that it felt convenient and natural to use within about a half dozen photographs.

From a workflow point of view, Raw Developer comes recommended. With the improvements that I'm told are on the way I would be happy to increase this to highly recommended.

As it stands, everything is adequate, most things are good and the implementation of curves is excellent (especially compared with the less than good implementation in Capture One).

Don't forget the links to parts two and three at the beginning of the article.

Update: Iridient have pointed out that thumbnail navigation is possible using <command-arrow>. I find that this doesn't work for me (too many fingers needed), but it might for you.