As a happy PureRaw version 1 user, I recently upgraded to version 4, and expected no problems.
Although I was a registered user of version 1, I had to pay full price for version 4.
PureRaw version 4 crashed immediately upon launch.
After crashing it caught its own exception and launched a crash reporter executable.
However, after closing the crash reporter executable,
PureRaw was relaunched and then crashed again, resulting in an infinite loop!
I had to use Process Explorer to kill the crash reporter executable to prevent the infinite loop.
After reporting the problem to DxO support, they told me the problem might be related to WMI on my Windows 10 system. A former software engineer, I am familiar with WMI. So I did some Internet research, wrote a small batch file, and ensured all the WMI classes on my system (which had not caused any problem for 5 years) were compiled correctly.
At this point PureRaw v4 launched correctly.
But upon attempting to process a Panasonic .RW2 raw file using PureRaw v4's new XD2 processing method, PureRaw returned a cryptic "Cannot process file" error message.
Upon contacting DxO support again, I was told there was a GPU-related bug.
I could uninstall PureRaw v4 and download a patched executable, which would be able to process files using their XD2 method, but without using the GPU, so it would be much slower.
At this point I asked customer service for a refund, and I was refused.
So with nothing else to lose I downloaded the patched executable, and compared the results from processing a 2017 total solar eclipse file (which I am finally getting around to processing) using 11 different settings within PureRaw v4 versus the results from processing with Adobe's newer Denoise feature in Lightroom.
I preferred the results from Adobe's Denoise, which showed finer detail and better contrast. Adobe's Denoise is also very slow, but on the plus side it produced a DNG file half the size of DxO's.
To be fair, DxO's support was very good, providing responses within a day of writing.
However in my opinion their development team should not have released this version without more testing.
And their corporate policy of not providing a customer refund in the case of software with major bugs, such as the inability to launch, is poor.
The PureRaw installer also configured PureRaw to run at system startup, without asking me first, which is bad practice in my opinion.
So I am stuck with a patched version of software which produces very good but not amazing results, which I may never use.
Of course if you are working on another operating system such as a Macintosh, using a different version of Windows, or processing other file types, PureRaw version 4 may work fine for you.
But this was my experience.
Although I was a registered user of version 1, I had to pay full price for version 4.
PureRaw version 4 crashed immediately upon launch.
After crashing it caught its own exception and launched a crash reporter executable.
However, after closing the crash reporter executable,
PureRaw was relaunched and then crashed again, resulting in an infinite loop!
I had to use Process Explorer to kill the crash reporter executable to prevent the infinite loop.
After reporting the problem to DxO support, they told me the problem might be related to WMI on my Windows 10 system. A former software engineer, I am familiar with WMI. So I did some Internet research, wrote a small batch file, and ensured all the WMI classes on my system (which had not caused any problem for 5 years) were compiled correctly.
At this point PureRaw v4 launched correctly.
But upon attempting to process a Panasonic .RW2 raw file using PureRaw v4's new XD2 processing method, PureRaw returned a cryptic "Cannot process file" error message.
Upon contacting DxO support again, I was told there was a GPU-related bug.
I could uninstall PureRaw v4 and download a patched executable, which would be able to process files using their XD2 method, but without using the GPU, so it would be much slower.
At this point I asked customer service for a refund, and I was refused.
So with nothing else to lose I downloaded the patched executable, and compared the results from processing a 2017 total solar eclipse file (which I am finally getting around to processing) using 11 different settings within PureRaw v4 versus the results from processing with Adobe's newer Denoise feature in Lightroom.
I preferred the results from Adobe's Denoise, which showed finer detail and better contrast. Adobe's Denoise is also very slow, but on the plus side it produced a DNG file half the size of DxO's.
To be fair, DxO's support was very good, providing responses within a day of writing.
However in my opinion their development team should not have released this version without more testing.
And their corporate policy of not providing a customer refund in the case of software with major bugs, such as the inability to launch, is poor.
The PureRaw installer also configured PureRaw to run at system startup, without asking me first, which is bad practice in my opinion.
So I am stuck with a patched version of software which produces very good but not amazing results, which I may never use.
Of course if you are working on another operating system such as a Macintosh, using a different version of Windows, or processing other file types, PureRaw version 4 may work fine for you.
But this was my experience.
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