I know it won't help the OP since he runs a windows machine, but I use aperture and I really like it both for work flow and as a raw converter. I find I can recover a fair bit more detail especially from highlights using aperture than ACR. Here is an example,
This shot really capture what I saw that night and IMO clearly brings more back from the highlights. Maybe someone else could do a better job with ACR than I did, but I made several attempts with ACR and I couldn't find a way to do better. I have also found that ACR works well in many other situations, but I am really enjoying using Aperture. I hope this is helpful.
Ditto on Aperture. It's everything I use nowadays and I can't imagine going back to a situation where I "developed" the raw files into tif or something. In Aperture you stay in the "raw world" until you export he images (for printing, mailing, web etc) in whatever size you need.
I wonder how many of these preferences are based on just what we use and (especially in the case of CS2/3) are influenced by the "learning moat" of the respective programs. Is there anyone (certainly not me) who knows all these program's features/capabilities well and can give us comparative opinions?
This may be true if you upgrade from XP to Vista, with Capture One 3.7 already installed. But when I try to install Capture One 3.7 onto a Vista machine I get errors that prevent the install.
photogenix wrote:
But CaptureOne v3.7 (and v4 beta) do run under Vista - just fine.
CaptureOne v3.7 won't do it well "out of the box" but all you need to do is to tick the "Run as Administrator" box in the desktop icon's properties.
Edited by dmccombs on Oct 01, 2007 at 08:18 AM GMT
Thank You ll for your comments and sugestions thus far. Based on the replies and my prefereences, I seem to have three viable options.
1) Try Lightroom/ACR again.
2) Try the new Capture One v4 beta.
3) Find a way to get Capture One 3.7 (without rebuilding my machine).
I loaded the ACR and Capture One v4, so I will see which suits me better. SO far, I have found ACR to have the better workflow, but Capture One to produce images more to my liking.
I will need a couple more weeks to test though as I don't know either product well yet. Although I had Capture One v3.7, v4 is very different.
I use Aperture and have found that I can do most of my image-editing in it as well. When I want to do some selective editing, I use Lightzone. If you've never heard of Lightzone, it uses an Ansel Adams-like zone system which masking that I find much easier than PS.
Aperture is missing a few features to make it the perfect solution for me but it is getting there. I prefer it to Lightroom but I'd say Lightroom and Aperture are very nearly equals and worth a tryout if you havent looked at them yet.
I've tried 'em all and I've now gone full-circle back to DPP. It just seems to produce the most pleasing results. The new version isn't a bad program at all, just a bit clunky.
I just wish Canon had the good sense to make the G9 compatible with it.
I used to use DPP. When ACR4.1 came out I switched and never look back.
I think DPP provides excellent colour, and its interface and feature set are catching up to other converters all the time.
The new sharpening tools in ACR4.1 work wonderfully for my purposes and I can do somewhat sophisticated sharpening without importing every shot into Photoshop. Add to that the "meant-to-be-together" integration of CS3 with ACR4.1 including the use of SmartObjects for RAW conversion and it's a real time and space-saver for me. No more temporary 16-bit TIFFs, no more multiple saved versions of conversion settings (or multiple .xmp files) and I can go right back to the RAW converter to tweak a slider just by double-clicking the smart object.
