RAW Converters?

[Pierre]

I have to be honest. Even though I've been a registered owner and user of PWP for years, I don't use it for raw conversion. I usually prefer to just start out with Nikon's own provided raw converter (ViewNX2 at this point) - mostly using the built-in the Neutral picture control and any other needed exposure control. Once I've got it as a 16-bit (48 bit in PWP) TIFF, then I go into PWP with it. It would take me a heck of a lot of work and experimentation to do what I can do with ViewNX in a minute, and frankly, I have not found a way to come up with as good a conversion with PWP or any other software. I felt the same way when I had a Canon camera and I used the provided DPP software.

If I want an alternative look, without any camera-applied sharpening, I use UFRAW. It's more intuitive and both much quicker and easier to see the result of every change applied, in any order. It truly flies compared to PWP's raw converter. It doesn't have noise reduction or sharpening, but I don't really want that in there anyway.

Now for doing things to the 16-bits per channel TIFF after that, it's PWP all the way.

I use raw files a lot, but I don't get any particular pleasure if I have to spend most of my time on the conversion. There is rarely that much I need to do to a raw beyond what the camera itself would have done or the controls the free converter provides. I mostly just need it so I can continue to work on it in 16-bits per channel.