Raw Shooter Premium Field Report

The program that originally sold me on RAW was CaptureOne DSLR, from PhaseOne, the Danish manufacturer of medium-format backs. It not only took the drudgery out of RAW processing, but actually made a RAW workflow easier, faster, more fluid, and more efficient than a JPEG workflow -- with all the flexibility and improved quality you get from RAW into the bargain. Eventually, some of the original developers of CaptureOne left to start their own company, and came out with Raw Shooter Essentials. I suddenly found myself using RSE a lot more often than CaptureOne LE -- despite the fact that I had paid for the latter, twice over in fact, after having to buy after-market color profiles to correct pretty egregious errors in the color reproduction. When Raw Shooter Premium finally came out, I bought it without even trying it out first. While I felt that I certainly got my money's worth (at least at the introductory price of about 65 euros), I still had one significant niggle with it: while certainly not the worst on the market, color accuracy still left something to be desired. Not long afterwards, Pixmantec came out with Color Engine -- as far as I can tell, just a fancy name for a package of camera profiles from the Internet's official camera profile guru, Magne Nilsen of Etcetera.

RAW workflow programs are in my opinion the most significant development in digital post-processing since Photoshop. They make it possible to process pictures intuitively and in real time, in big batches at a time, seeing exactly what you're doing, and improving consistency and quality in the process. Spend a minute or two on one picture getting the white balance right, then click-click, apply it to every shot in the series. Spend another minute or two on another picture, getting the tone and color right, click-click, apply it to the rest. Then do little adjustments on individual images that need it, for exposure for example, kick them into the processing queue, and move on to the next batch. Enormously easier than wading through them one by one in Photoshop, even with the help of the widgets that have been tacked on afterwards.

"Ghost of the Cathedral," processed twice in RSP, then blended in Photoshop. Nope, a RAW workflow tool won't obsolete Photoshop -- there are still some sophisticated things you just can't do at one pass. But it does make doing the basic and most common work much, much easier.

In order to really work, a RAW workflow application has to get three things right: image quality, image controls, and workflow. It has to give you the controls to do what you want, the workflow to do it fluidly, easily, without making you wait, and without interruptions, and it has to deliver results that are at least "good enough" if not absolutely the best possible. Combined with the Color Engine, RSP delivers on all three counts (a few niggles aside), and even without it, it only falls a little short in one of the areas -- namely color accuracy.

It's pretty obvious that I like RSP. A lot. It's not perfect, and there's a definite learning curve involved, but once over it, it's clearly the nicest RAW workflow program I've used, and really leaves very little to be desired. So, what you're reading isn't as much a review as a field report -- my write-up on what it is that I like about it (plus a few things I don't), and how I feel you should proceed if you want to make the most of it. Pixmantec has the courage to do things differently, which means that their program is easy to misunderstand and takes something of an open mind to approach -- but after the initial hurdle, at least I have found it an immensely powerful tool to use.