So if you look at the images in the test and wonder why they’re not so good – it’s because I selected them to be like that. I believe that test images should not be perfect – how would I be able to check chromatic aberrations if the image was taken with a razor-sharp, $2000 lens? Or how could I evaluate highlight recovery for a perfectly-exposed scene? Or noise at low ISO? or… you get the picture. Again, some programs (DXO and Capture One) did not support it.

Second of all, I initially had some nice architectural pictures from Milan and Paris that were taken with a compact camera (a perfect test for noise reduction, chromatic aberrations and so on). If you think that would be easy, well, I actually had to run a program to recover some pics from my cards. Unfortunately, DXO and Bibble don’t support DNG, so for this test I had to find some RAWs. I made a habit years ago to convert all my pics to DNG. Test imagesįor this test I found myself in the difficult position of not having enough test images. Originally, this article presented the beta version of Bibble 5, once it was released I retested and included new results from it. It’s good to keep in mind however that it may add features and/or improve image quality before it is released. In the case of Silky Pix, I started testing it, but I felt it’s not in the same league as the others, so a direct comparison would not be fair.Īlso, in the case of Lightroom 3, it is still beta software I decided that it’s stable enough to be used in production, so it wouldn’t be unfair to it. I did not select Aperture for this review because it’s older (apart from updates and patches it’s still a 2008 product) and it’s also the only Mac-only product (all the programs in this test are available for both PC and Mac Bibble is also available for Linux).

Notable absents would be Apple Aperture and Silky Pix.

With new releases in RAW processing software, I decided to take a look at the newest professional programs and see how they measure up in terms of image quality, features, UI and speed.

Dxo pureraw lightroom workflow