Tennessee Photography by Bradley Proctor

If you are looking to get the most out or your photography, shooting in RAW is a must. In my previous article RAW vs JPEG I explained some of the advantages of shooting in RAW. In this article, I wanted to share a little about my experiences with some of the many RAW converters that are available.

There are many different RAW converters out there and for the most part, they all do a decent job of converting the RAW data. A few months ago I started using Adobe Lightroom. I have to say that Adobe Lightroom has quickly become my favorite. Not just for it’s quality in RAW conversion (which uses the same RAW engine as Adobe Camera RAW) but also for it’s entire workflow environment that allows quick processing and organization of my images.

dcraw

There are several freely available RAW converters out there and they are typically based on code from dcraw. dcraw is a RAW converter engine written by David Coffin. It is well written, supports numerous cameras, fast, and gives excellent image quality. RAW converters based on dcraw will generally be about the same in this regard. But they differ in how they are used.

UFRaw

When I first learned about shooting RAW, I was running Linux on my computer and my choice of RAW converters where limited. UFRaw was my first RAW converter that I tried. It is designed to only do the RAW conversion of a single RAW image. It’s interface I found to be complex. It has a bit of a learning curve to understand what all the control mean. As a result, I have to admit, I continued to shoot primarily JPEG for quite some time because it was easier, and this so called better image quality and processing capability that I had heard about from shooting RAW images certainly wasn’t showing up in my images. They always looked terrible. I never did learn how to properly use UFRaw. As I eventually moved on to DigiKam. UFRaw uses dcraw for the RAW conversion, so I’m sure the image quality is fine however.

Digikam

I found DigiKam to be much more user friendly. At this point I started shooting all my images in RAW. DigiKam made it easy to process my images. I enjoyed using DigiKam as it has many excellent tools for processing images. Some of which, I believe to be superior to any other software I have used. DigiKam also uses dcraw for it’s RAW conversion. However, I often ran into bugs that made the software difficult to use (and in some cases, these bugs rendered those nice tools useless). DigiKam has so much potential, but the authors seem to be more interested in adding new features than fixing critical bugs. Because of this I found the software almost unusable and eventually started looking for other options.

Bibble

Of the RAW converters that I have tried to date, Bibble is my least favorite. After frustrations with software bugs in Digikam, I gave Bibble a try. The way that Bibble processes the images appears to me to be overdone. Bibble has an automatic processing mode that results in images that are over-saturated, and over-sharpened. Bibble also does not give the user a great deal of control of manually processing the images. However, I have to admit that I don’t hear a lot of negative comments about Bibble and I didn’t spend a lot of time with the program. Bibble didn’t last half the trial period on my computer. At this point I decided that there wasn’t really any good options for processing images on Linux so I made the switch to Windows. I hope this changes someday, as I do think Linux is an excellent operating system.

Canon’s Digital Photo Professional

Canon’s software, Digital Photo Profession (DPP) does a so-so job of RAW conversion, you might expect more since they made the camera. But alas, they are in the business of selling Cameras, not software. I have heard often from people that use DPP that it produces good skin tones. I personally can’t comment on that as I don’t typically photograph people. I didn’t care much for the user interface either. I found it a little difficult to work with, but I suppose that if one were to get used to using the software it would be fine. I guess I sometimes don’t have much patience with software. DPP does an adequate job of RAW conversion, but it’s certainly less than optimal. DPP was my RAW converter for a short time until I gave Adobe Lightroom a try.

Adobe Lightroom

The first time I used Adobe Lightroom, I had a little trouble figuring out how to work the image library, but I think that is just because it was the first time I’ve used any type of software for that purpose. The processing of images I found to be quick and easy, user friendly, and of excellent quality. Combined with Adobe Photoshop CS3, it doesn’t get much better for the photographer. Now if only we could get Adobe to lower their high prices. But as the saying goes, you get what you pay for and this case is no exception.

Other RAW Converters

There are many other RAW converters out there such as Capture One, Aperture, and Huelight just to name a few. I think that for the most part, the difference in the actual RAW conversion between all of these programs is relatively small compared to how the image processing is accomplished. What I mean by that is that I find I can produce quality images with Lightroom simply because of the ease of control I have over the process.