With the recent Adobe Announcement of the last ACR update for CS6 tried CaptureOnePro 8 together DPP. Have wondered about trying DxO Optics, but they seem to be more of technicians than photographers (considering all DxO stuff). And last not least, all raw converters reviewers consider C1 slightly better than DxO Optics.
To my relief (not surprise) C1 did the overall best job on 5Ds R raw files. The most remarkable difference was with wide angle lenses but also with longer primes (59 mm macro, 100mm macro). ACR had very bad wide angle edges and had some false halos around contrasty edges even with the 100mm macro (lens profiles enabled).
When the photo is well lit and has medium contrast, then DPP 4 (with DLO) makes extremely good images, especially in wide angle lens corners. However DPP at the moment falls short mainly in highlight/shadow recovery area.
C1 has the best highlight/shadow recovery tools (along many other goodies like ability to profile TS-E lens) and gives much better details and less artifacts than ACR.
On top of it - ACR never got good colors from my G1x Mark II raws - they needed lot of tweaking. C1 gets everything just right by default. I am impressed.
Where all menitoned raw converters fall short is sharpening and noise reduction. Not that they are unusable. Simply dedicated tools (I use Focus Magic and Topaz InFocus for sharpening; NeatImage and Topaz DeNoise for noise reduction) are still the best.
Initially C1 workflow is different. But once you understand the ideas behind it, it has its strengths. Afterall, we care about image quality. I will give C1 few weeks of trial, but my initial impression is very positive and it is definitely better than ACR.
