Raw Developer (software from Iridient Digital)

April 2006 (other articles)

Part Three

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.

Index

Part one is an introduction and disclaimer. It deals with workflow.

Part two deals with monochrome conversions.

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

But is it any good?

If you have read parts one and two you might be thinking 'that's all very well, but are the conversions any good?'

This is where this review gets much more subtle. Yes, the conversions are good, and I am going to go on to give you some examples, but what I can't do is say whether they are the best for you. Raw Developer conversions have some striking characterisics. I like them. I've corresponded with people who like them. It is, however, a matter of taste.

Converted in Raw Developer with no noise reduction applied. This photograph is better in monochrome, but that wouldn't demonstrate the noise as well.

Raw Developer seems to be optimised for extracting the maximum amount of detail out of a file. One correspondent put it this way: "RD was a revelation I must say, what a difference, I'm even reconsidering digital for landscape work. That 'micro contrast' bite is back and the detail rendered is amazing, it will depend on the subject matter to a great extent....."

The downside of this is a certain amount of noise. This isn't ugly I-set-the-ISO-wrong noise, but it is visible, and measurable. People have described it as film like. I find that it doesn't intrude into real prints - it is something much more visible on screen when looking at 100% extracts. The photo above has had no noise reduction applied (even the default noise reduction in Raw Developer was turned off). It doesn't look noisy to me, but Noise Ninja measured a luminance noise of 31 and a chroma noise of 8. The same file converted through Capture One measured 6 and 3.

This is an older file, and one from small sensor camera (the Konica Minolta A2) which is inherently fairly noisy. Below are some 100% extracts with different processing.

I asked Iridient about their design philosophy. This is what they said: "I've definitely been more focused on resolving excellent detail vs. having low noise up until this point with RAW Developer. Some high megapixel digicams have really started to have some pretty poor noise performance lately so noise is something I plan to address much better in the future. I think there will always be some tradeoff between detail and noise, but there are some pretty good methods of significantly reducing noise without sacrificing a lot of detail and/or giving a sort of "fake" digital look to images."

And excellent detail is what you get. Here is an example:

This is a screen shot of the file used in part one. The background version is the Raw Developer version and the overlay version is from Capture One. I messed around with the sharpening tools to get the files looking as similar as possible. In both cases adding sharpening started to create noticeable faults. The Raw Developer version shows more detail.

There are files that don't suit the Raw Developer trade off. If your pictures emphasise smooth tones and not detail then the Raw Developer results may not be what you want. An example:

This is the Raw Developer version of this file. The only area of detail is the armpit. The Capture One version is slightly smoother throughout. That happens to suit this photo (unless you like chaffinch armpits).

The thing that I like about the Raw Developer philosophy is that it puts control into my hands. If your raw converter removes detail on the assumption that you want a smoother result, you can't undo that later. Whereas it is always possible to smooth a photo in later processing if you think that it needs doing. My preliminary view is that a mixture of Raw Developer processing and Noise Ninja noise reduction provides a result that suits some mid-megapixel cameras well. With my Phase One digital back, and only looking at modest sized work prints, Raw Developer by itself was fine.

I haven't done a lot of super enlargements with files converted through Raw Developer (this review has to stop somewhere) but my, again preliminary, view is that having the extra detail is a help. Applying noise reduction, perhaps selectively, later in the processing gives great results.

A few other considerations

Most of the conversions that I have done with Raw Developer were done on a dual processor G5. As you would expect things zipped along nicely. In fact Raw Developer performed faultlessly. I did provoke one crash by selecting a very large folder to load, then clicking on a file before the folder had finished loading, and then changing my mind and clicking on another, and then trying to quit the application. All of this whilst writing to an external drive and with Photoshop open and consuming lots of memory. Pretty extreme stuff. The crash had a soft landing with no other process interupted. Raw Developer opened again without hesitation.

In the interests of testing I also performed a few conversions on a low memory G4. I know from experience that Capture One overwhelms this particular computer. Raw Developer ran fine.

Iridient are finalising a Universal binary version for the new Intel Macs for release in the coming weeks (are you listening Adobe?).

Conclusion

I can only recommend that you try Raw Developer for yourself. It has become my raw converter of choice, displacing a much more expensive and power hungry product. There will be a few pictures that it doesn't suit, although even here results are acceptable, and in combination with Noise Ninja, excellent.

Ideally one has several raw converters to hand and the time to have gained experience in them all to be able to select the best for a given image. However, in the real world, Raw Developer is the best one shot solution that I know of (for Mac users at least).

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