Iridient Developer

RAW Developer is a must-have for me. I shoot with an Olympus E-P1 and a Panasonic LX3, and the RAW files from both of these cameras are corrected for barrel distortion when converted in Adobe Camera Raw, SilkyPix, Olympus Master and most other RAW converters. RAW Developer doesn't apply any corrections, which enables me to apply however much (or little) correction I want in Photoshop, and also enables me to recover additional bits of the image around the edges. The workflow in RAW Developer is similar to Adobe Camera Raw, which makes it easy and fast for me to use. The image preview updates as corrections are applied, and the result is an image that is as good as or better than what I can get from ACR. Image settings are saved in files with a .rdsf extension, so they don't conflict with the .xml files created by ACR. The only other RAW converter I could find that doesn't apply corrections to images during conversion is Raw Photo Processor. I have used RPP several times and even donated to unlock additional features, but I gave up after a while, as I found it just too difficult. The UI is awkward, the documentation doesn't explain things very well, the preview does not update automatically, and I never could get the highlight recovery feature to work properly. In comparison, RAW Developer is a pleasure to use. My only (minor) complaint about RAW Developer is that the documentation is somewhat out of date (it appears to be for version 1.4). As a result, there is no explanation of a few settings, but in most cases I have been able to figure out what they do through trial and error (although I'm at a loss to guess what "TC Shadow" means).

Absolutely 5 Stars app - ID does some unique things that help image quality that you will not find elsewhere. Examples: - sharpening - this has multiple state of the art sharpening algorithms at your disposal that rival or exceed other leading raw converters (C1, DXO, LR, ...) - noise reduction - works really well - monochrome conversion - one of the few apps (besides AccuRaw Monochrome) that applies a different de-bayering algorithm specifically for monochrome (again with 2 choices of preference, including smooth tonality) What it doesn't do (yet): Missing the powerful color wheels of C1 (to be fair, no other app does those). Missing convenience features from LR (e.g. automatic perspective correction). Missing local adjustments (= if you're using ID, you still need an image editor, e.g. Photoshop, to finalize processing all of your images to your satisfaction. With LR, arguably you could try and get by just with the raw converter). ID doesn't try and do DAM (asset management) and I would score that as a positive. The half assed capabilities in some other tools only slow down my workflow. ID is focused and fast, I hope it stays that way.

I've used Iridient Developer as an alternative to Lightroom when I want to recover the entire image captured by the sensor on cameras where lens correction is applied in software. I recently purchased a Canon G7X, and was pleased to see that the beta of version 3 includes support for this new camera. I was surprised, therefore, when I opened a RAW image in Iridient Developer at the default "camera aspect ratio" setting and there were fewer pixels than in the accompanying JPEG from the camera. Even at the "maximum" setting, Iridient Developer gave me fewer pixels on one side of the image than the camera gave me in the JPEG, and I assume Lightroom will give me when support for the G7X is added. I might have paid the upgrade fee (40% discount, which means USD $60 to upgrade), but not if I can't get all the pixels that the sensor recorded.

There is a 29% discount on at the developer's site until 27/12/2013 with this coupon : Iridient9

Though RAW Dev is still by far the best raw processor, the high upgrade price is too steep imo