On Sep 19, 2005, at 1:12 PM, Tim Sherburne wrote:
The bundled Pentax software blows goats (thanks, Cory), so I've been
looking at alternatives.
Oooh, that's frightening... ]'-)
Raw Shooter Essentials is an obvious choice, given that it's free and
relatively well-made, but it's not available for the Mac. Photoshop
CS2 is
waaay too expensive for me; I'd rather spend the money on lenses.
I took a look at Bibble Lite, but wasn't happy with the usability
compared
to Capture One and Photoshop Elements 3. Capture One is just about RAW
conversion, while PSE 3 has a bunch of other photo editing tools.
Photoshop Elements v3.0 has most of the essential editing tools that
Photoshop CS has and allows you to use Camera Raw v3.1, which is the
RAW converter I prefer. It's available for about $90. There are also
add-in packages available from several sources to increase its
versatility.
I use Photoshop CS2 myself and have gotten excellent results with
Camera Raw. I've played with the Capture One eval just a little bit
but didn't see that it provided me much beyond what I can do with
CS2, although the workflow is probably easier to learn for volume
conversion work. I want the integrated RAW and RGB editing
environment too.
Other available converters include dcraw, Vuescan, and Silkypix that
I've heard about. Only one of those I've used is Vuescan because it
does NOT do hot pixel removal ... occasionally useful if I'm trying
to analyze something.
Godfrey
