Why did you switch raw developers?

Thanks. I'll probably stumble on with Darktable until Black Friday to see what deal comes up. If I can pick up PL6 for the regular price of just Pure Raw I'll go ahead and purchase that. Pure Raw on its own is on the pricey side.

A few weeks ago, my frustrations with Darktable came to a head, and my trial period of DxO was about to run out. From previous experience I discarded Lightroom and Capture One put of hand, as I didn't want to buy a rental license for the former, and had been frustrated in the past with the latter.

To cut a long story short, I came back to Capture One. At the moment, I don't have much time, nor mental space, to futz with raw development. And Capture One is above all very quick and effective. Those speed edit keys really are a great thing.

I have no doubt I'll circle back to darktable eventually, when time allows. I might even pick up DxO when or goes on sale at some point, if only for the denoising.

I disliked the free version of Capture One for Sony because of the catalog. I prefer the regular filesystem.

In the paid version of Capture One you can suppress the catalog, I heard. C1 does give good results though.

Indeed, the only reasonable way of using Capture One is in its direct file system access mode, roundabout though it is. If they'd ever take that away, I'd be leaving so fast. I intensely dislike dealing with virtual catalog directory instead of the perfectly usable and flexible file directories I already have. It's yet another way of imprisoning my data in a proprietary silo.

I also started with Picture Window. Actually, for a very short period of time I used Photoshop before Picture Window. I still use Picture Window Pro for a lot of things, but not raw processing. I've tried almost every raw converter over the years and I'm currently happy with ACDSee 23. The noise reduction has improved over previous versions. The noise reduction may not be as good as DXO Prime, but it works for me. One feature I like a lot is Light EQ. All in all it;s easy to use and has a lot of useful features.
Bob

Add me to the list of frustrated Darktable users, prefer running Linux on personal computers.

I've been testing DxO in a virtualbox and been very impressed. Easier to get results I'm happy with. The AI noise reduction is a gamechanger. I've also been playing around with my camera manufacturer's own raw editor (Canon DPP4). Again much easier to get results. It's interface is dated, clunky and feels sluggish though.

I don't want to spend a ton of time mucking about with raws.

Happy to hear DxO PhotoLab works in VirtualBox! It is easier to use than Darktable, with better noise reduction. People complain about highlight recovery in PhotoLab and maybe Darktable can do better.

I like Linux too, but was at the mercy of crappy PC laptops. MacOS is nice and HomeBrew provides most open source software. Nothing like a cool M1/M2 laptop chassis when it's 100F outside.

I switched because my old software was incompatible with a new camera,

I switched to Adobe Camera Raw because it was faster, simpler, and more direct than Lightroom, without all the back ending catalog stuff.

A long time ago I switched to Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) from Sigma's proprietary converter Sigma Photo Pro (SPP). Back then, ACR could open Sigma X3F raw files and adjust them before importing into PhotoShop Elements 6. But one day I tried to make a Digital Camera Profile for my Sigma SD9 using all-Adobe's stuff Nowhere was there a folder where I could successfully put my brave little .dcp file, including Adobes very own folders for all their DCP's. ACR simply did not recognize it, under Sigma, only allowing a profile mysteriously called "Embedded". Then newer Sigma models came out which ACR would not convert properly because Sigma changed the X3F format. So I downloaded Elements 7 hoping that Adobe would catch up and made the absolutely horrendous mistake of activating the Catalog - thereby slowing my XP computer to a crawl with no going back!

From that time since, my computers have been Adobe-free including Flash and Acrobat, not just their stupid photo stuff.

As to "switching", I have stuck with SPP and with exporting as 16-bit TIFF, ProPhoto space, to complete my processing and, now that I have gone retro - only owning an original Sigma SD9, - FastStone Viewer works well enough for most shots. The GIMP for analysis and layers plus masking - and RawThjerapee for really serious global editing.

Adobe-free and proud of it ...

Bear with me I'm new to this. I hear people saying EXIF. What does that mean? I've seen an EXIF setting on my adobe

It's a standard for embedding camera data (Msker, model, settings, lens, and much, much more) into a file such as JPEG, or TIFF but not all file types.

More here:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exif

I think this is what is called meta data? I learned about that in college. Its like data about data? If that makes sense?

Correct! Sometimes there is more meta-data than just EXIF. One example is IPTC, see here:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPTC_Information_Interchange_Model

I add IPTC (and XMP) meta-data to my stuff using XnView MP to help searching my HD and to add a copyright, etc to posted images.

So I am learning stuff in college? 😀

I tried to send you a message xpat but it wouldn't let me. I am on skype though if you want to drop me a hi. My skype ID live:.cid.2864af2d30926db4

That you are! More to learn here too ...

No problem - and I'm too old for modern stuff like Skype (my phone isn't even connected to the web), I'm 83 ...