My New Approach To RAW Processing

(Apologies, if this has already been covered)

So why not start with PhotoLab? So I copy my photos from card into my file structure.

Then I start in PhotoLab and decide image by image which ones merit further work (admittedly, it takes time for all the photos to become visible, but I have plenty of that). To those, I apply whatever presets and processing I want and export to Lightroom.

I think of this as a "soft cull". all the photos stay on disk and I can go back to them, but the "good ones" are in Lightroom, where I can work further on them.

I think this would be burdensome with a high volume of photos, but it seems to work for me.

I will admit on my old machine it could take awhile, but I never had one take 5 minutes. On my new computer I just timed it for a full Canon R5 RAW file. After making adjustments including deep prime the time to finish was 7 seconds. I just timed an export from PL 5.

A brilliant post!  Thanks for that.
I too am a long time LR user.  Personally, I find it tragic that LR, once the state of the art, needs a third-party plug-in to achieve what so many of its customers now demand.  Is there any possibility that LR will soon incorporate similar advanced noise reduction and sharpening algorithms?  LR has Raw Detail and Super Resolution, but I find them a bit of a squib compared to the DxO and Topaz offerings.

BobT3218 wrote:

A brilliant post! Thanks for that.
I too am a long time LR user. Personally, I find it tragic that LR, once the state of the art, needs a third-party plug-in to achieve what so many of its customers now demand. Is there any possibility that LR will soon incorporate similar advanced noise reduction and sharpening algorithms? LR has Raw Detail and Super Resolution, but I find them a bit of a squib compared to the DxO and Topaz offerings.

Adobe is a slow moving corporation with many priorities across 30+ apps so LR will develop    at a slower pace than some of the competitors that are focusing on their LR alternatives.

That said I feel that Adobe is working harder these days to stay relevant and adding better features more often.
The new masking tools are very good as an example.

What I personally find is that Adobe have done a very good job at the core functionality of LR and PS and the results I get from LR generally suit me better than most of the alternatives. 
I would perhaps feel differently if there was no way to integrate other software into my LR and PS workflow, but as that is possible I am content with Adobe.

I also find the £9.00/month subscription price for the Photography pack very reasonable as It includes PS for my commercial work.

davidedric wrote:

(Apologies, if this has already been covered)

So why not start with PhotoLab? So I copy my photos from card into my file structure.

Then I start in PhotoLab and decide image by image which ones merit further work (admittedly, it takes time for all the photos to become visible, but I have plenty of that). To those, I apply whatever presets and processing I want and export to Lightroom.

I think of this as a "soft cull". all the photos stay on disk and I can go back to them, but the "good ones" are in Lightroom, where I can work further on them.

I think this would be burdensome with a high volume of photos, but it seems to work for me.

More and more these days after culling my images I generally work exclusively in DXO, I don't go back and forth to LR.

Kokopelli_Rocks wrote:

After I bought my R5 last year I continued to use LR (LR user since version 1). I was not happy with the results I was getting with LR and decided to try different RAW tools. After several months of testing I settled on DXO PL4. I agree with you the product is resource intensive. I was using a 6+ year old XPS with a I-7 6700 with 16GB. I doubled my memory to 32 and the software ran better, but the processing of image was slooooow. The results were good so I continued to use DXO and upgraded to version 5.

Last wee I was in Costco and saw a sale on a Dell XPS 8950, I-7 12700, 32 GB, and GeForce 3060 with 8GB, Killer™ WiFi 6 (2x2/160) Gig+ and Bluetooth® 5.2. Best of all the machine was $400 off. I am very impressed with the new Alder Lake CPUs the first Intel CPUs using 10nm process.

So how does the system perform with DXO - all I can say is amazing. Takes a few seconds to process an R5 RAW image (not cRAW). So fast, that I don't even have time to start on my next image before the first is complete. The new system is great with DXO PL5, Topaz and Luminar Neo.

I know my solution is not possible for everyone, but I am thrilled with the new system. The upgrade cost less than an R7.

I have all that but not the GeForce 3060 GPU.  I was hoping more software designers would take advantage of the ever increasing power of iGPUs like the UHD Graphics 770 in the i7_12700K.  Sadly they are ignoring iGPUs and taking the easy route of requiring users to have thumping bid gaming discrete GPUs like the GForce 3060.  I'm coming to the realisation that I'll have to fork out another $500-$700 to get one.  It was not long ago that Adobe was proud to claim that LR was not very GPU dependent.  They have changed their tune.

BobT3218 wrote:

Kokopelli_Rocks wrote:

After I bought my R5 last year I continued to use LR (LR user since version 1). I was not happy with the results I was getting with LR and decided to try different RAW tools. After several months of testing I settled on DXO PL4. I agree with you the product is resource intensive. I was using a 6+ year old XPS with a I-7 6700 with 16GB. I doubled my memory to 32 and the software ran better, but the processing of image was slooooow. The results were good so I continued to use DXO and upgraded to version 5.

Last wee I was in Costco and saw a sale on a Dell XPS 8950, I-7 12700, 32 GB, and GeForce 3060 with 8GB, Killer™ WiFi 6 (2x2/160) Gig+ and Bluetooth® 5.2. Best of all the machine was $400 off. I am very impressed with the new Alder Lake CPUs the first Intel CPUs using 10nm process.

So how does the system perform with DXO - all I can say is amazing. Takes a few seconds to process an R5 RAW image (not cRAW). So fast, that I don't even have time to start on my next image before the first is complete. The new system is great with DXO PL5, Topaz and Luminar Neo.

I know my solution is not possible for everyone, but I am thrilled with the new system. The upgrade cost less than an R7.

I have all that but not the GeForce 3060 GPU. I was hoping more software designers would take advantage of the ever increasing power of iGPUs like the UHD Graphics 770 in the i7_12700K. Sadly they are ignoring iGPUs and taking the easy route of requiring users to have thumping bid gaming discrete GPUs like the GForce 3060. I'm coming to the realisation that I'll have to fork out another $500-$700 to get one. It was not long ago that Adobe was proud to claim that LR was not very GPU dependent. They have changed their tune.

I ran a speed test on the same image and same parameters with PL5 on my old machine and my new machine. On the old Dell XPS, DXO took 2 minutes 45 seconds to finish exporting the image, on the new machine 7-8 seconds. My exports with DXO PL5 now finish generally in the 7-8 seconds range with a few long taking 10 seconds.