Lightroom and RAW Developer in Parallel?

[MyEcholalia]

Dear all,

so far, I have been using Lightroom as a catalog application and RAW converter. Just recently though, I have come across Iridient's RAW Developer and have to say that the quality of the conversion is just amazing. The level of detail and smoothness of gradations are great. So, going forward I would like to still use Lightroom for cataloging my images, but use RAW Developer at least for converting the best images.

Is anybody using the combination of Lightroom and RAW Developer? Any tips on workflow across the 2 applications? Known problems with regards to ratings and metadata? I would love to hear from you.

  Regards, Thorsten

[digitaldog]

Dear all,

so far, I have been using Lightroom as a catalog application and RAW converter. Just recently though, I have come across Iridient's RAW Developer and have to say that the quality of the conversion is just amazing. The level of detail and smoothness of gradations are great. So, going forward I would like to still use Lightroom for cataloging my images, but use RAW Developer at least for converting the best images.

Is anybody using the combination of Lightroom and RAW Developer? Any tips on workflow across the 2 applications? Known problems with regards to ratings and metadata? I would love to hear from you.

  Regards, Thorsten

Agreed, RD is an amazingly good converter and I've found some areas recently where it really trumped the ACR engine, especially with respect to highlight recovery. I suspect, but haven't tried it, that you could setup RD as an external editor but of course, all the metadata instructions would be "invisible" to LR. so you'd use it as a DAM so to speak, but unless you render out the data from RD, which of course you'd want to do as you'd be using its engine, the rest of LR would be of questionable use. So I could see an "open in external editor" being RD, have it save the rendered TIFF then store that TIFF in LR for all subsequent (non Develop) work.

Oh, here's a side by side of RD and LR in terms of the issues with highlights (I don't think its necessary to label which is which):

[michael]

I face a similar situation with using Capture One and Lightroom. I would prefer to use LR, but it does not support my P65+ (yet).

So what I do is basic processing in C1 (white balance, white point, black point) and then export to a watched hot folder in Lightroom. I then do the rest of my image processing on the 16 bit TIFF in LR and if needed Photoshop as well.

It's a pretty seamless workflow, and I'll have a brief article on it published soon.

Michael

[Baxter]

LR2 is used for editing before the images are processed. Despite trying different calibrations/published settings I am not a fan of the colour output from LR2, although it is much improved from LR1. Thus I find myself using depending on the image and camera a wide range of RAW file developers in conjunction with LR2. In no particular order these are DxO Optics, Capture One and Capture NX2 - might have to look at RAW developer and see if I can diversify still further! Aperture 2 is currently 'resting'.......

The exported TIFFs are placed in aptly named sub-folders in LR so I can keep track of where the files are. Yes it means taking up more storage space, but relatively ruthless editing helps keep it manageable.

[James R]

Dear all,

so far, I have been using Lightroom as a catalog application and RAW converter. Just recently though, I have come across Iridient's RAW Developer and have to say that the quality of the conversion is just amazing. The level of detail and smoothness of gradations are great. So, going forward I would like to still use Lightroom for cataloging my images, but use RAW Developer at least for converting the best images.

Is anybody using the combination of Lightroom and RAW Developer? Any tips on workflow across the 2 applications? Known problems with regards to ratings and metadata? I would love to hear from you.

  Regards, Thorsten

I have been using CO1 Pro to ingest raw files, do major adjustments, and then export as .tif's.  The .tif's are then imported into LR2--these images have much greater detail, besides, I prefer how CO1 handles color.  Once in LR2 I will make any round trips to PS or Nik plug-ins.  Also, IMO, LR is the best program from which to print.

Good luck.  

[BernardLanguillier]

I face a similar situation with using Capture One and Lightroom. I would prefer to use LR, but it does not support my P65+ (yet).

So what I do is basic processing in C1 (white balance, white point, black point) and then export to a watched hot folder in Lightroom. I then do the rest of my image processing on the 16 bit TIFF in LR and if needed Photoshop as well.

I am really not sure about the value of LR in such a scenario.

I use C1 also, and all my global image modifications are done there, the rest is only done in PS because it involves masking and local modifications that LR was not designed to handle well.

If we are just speaking about a DAM, then photo mechanics is probably the best option out there (http://www.camerabits.com/site/index.html).

I told Jeff and other people at Adobe already years ago that Lightroom had to be an open platform enabling third party raw conversion engines to be used in an integrated way... they didn't listen and it looks now more and more like serious shooters are converting they raw files with other software.

Regards,
Bernard

[MyEcholalia]

... So what I do is basic processing in C1 (white balance, white point, black point) and then export to a watched hot folder in Lightroom. I then do the rest of my image processing on the 16 bit TIFF in LR and if needed Photoshop as well...

Michael

Thanks for the feedback. Well, I guess I have to go the route of using more disk space for TIFFs in order to get the quality I want. Just have to find out now how I can do general selection and rating of images outside of Lightroom to determine which ones to process further in order to export as TIFFs and import into LR. But maybe that's something you will touch on in your article?

Best regards, Thorsten