Managing PureRAW DNG and Camera RAW File (e.g. CR3) in Lightroom

What PureRAW delivers is amazing. It is tempted to include it as part of my workflow (with Lightroom). But am I the only one find that managing the camera RAW and PureRaw DNG files to be inconvenient? Mainly in two situations:

  1. When I want to delete a photo after it has gone through both PureRaw and LR, camera CR3 file is not linked thus won’t be deleted automatically. Same to the body-emitted JPGs.
  2. When a new version of PureRAW is released, there doesn’t seem to be any way to preserve the LR adjustments while taking advantage of the newer technologies in a new DNG.

I was thinking about stacking as a solution for 1), but as a result of shooting wildlife, 00:00:00 auto-stacking won’t work for a burst of photos taken within a second.

It would indeed be nice if DxO offered an option to

  • stack results with the original files (instead of using a subfolder or custom folder as targets).

This should also work when images are brought into PureRAW from different source folders.
Fore ease of use in such a case,

  • export should also have an option to create, in Lightroom, a collection of originals and results.

First off I think it’s a mistake to delete the original out of camera RAW for your keepers. If new versions of PureRAW or other software merit reprocessing you’ll want to go back to your original file to do it.

I’m on a Mac so I’m not certain if the following applies to a PC. If I save metadata to file in LR before processing in PR then the changes I applied to the raw are also applied to the DNG after import. My workflow is to first import all photos into LR from a shoot. I then cull to identify keepers. This may require cropping, white balance and other tweaks to settle on the right images. If I want to preserve these changes I save metadata. Then I drag and drop (I know this is Mac only) to PR. After processing I go back to LR and synchronize the folder. This brings in the DNGs.

I then complete processing on the DNGs. If I were to need to reprocess say due to a new revision of PR I would repeat the above and then selectively copy develop setting from the first DNG to the new one.