I am new here. Recently tested PureRaw2 with my Fujifilm Raw files and am very impressed. It renders the RAFs better than any other software, and I intend to buy it.
Coming from XTransformer, PureRaw2 seems to be perfect for my workflow. However, I often consider the sharpening (even with “Global sharpening” turned off) too much. Reading through the forums and comments on Youtube I don’t seem to be the only one.
I have read that PhotoLab offers the options to turn sharpening off (as well as adjust how much denoising there should be, which would be great too).
My question to DXO staff:
Will there be an update to PureRaw that allows for a more careful sharpening of my Raw files (a slider or the option to turn of sharpening completely)?
Or do you recommend me to buy PhotoLab?
The latter seems to be an overkill, but the options to manually adjust sharpening (and to an extent, denoising) would be worth it.
While I can’t give you a “Yes or No” answer about more-controllable sharpening or noise-reduction in PureRAW, I can tell you that Photolab 5.2 definitely has complete user control over sharpening and NR, all the way from OFF to VERY STRONG.
PR2 is designed to be a “quick solution” type of program to produce a DNG file from a RAW file with lens corrections and NR already applied that is suitable for further processing in another processor(such as LR or C1), with minimal user adjustments needed. Whereas PL5.2 is a complete end-to-end photo processor, provided that pixel-editing is not necessary. You can export to Photoshop or Affinity Photo if you need to use a pixel editor. I find that I can do everything I want in PL5.2 and have no need for a pixel editor 95% of the time.
You are correct in assuming that having both PR2 and PL5.2 is overkill as all of the functionality of PR2 is contained in PL5.2, with more controllability. Why not use the 30 day trial period to try out PL5.2. You may just find that you like it better than what you’ve been using.
I’ll try out PL5.2. By overkill I didn’t mean getting both pieces of software but that I don’t really need all of PL’s features. I would be perfectly happy with PR2 and sliders for sharpening and denoising, since I’d like to stay with the workflow I got used to (Lightroom).
Reading through the forums I find that these seem to be the features that most people have asked for. There hasn’t been any response from DXO for a while, so I am just assuming the company wants people to buy PL5.2.
The adjustment features, as you point out, are not available in PureRaw 2. Perhaps DxO will consider adding those features into PureRaw 3 since similar standalone offerings from both Topaz and ON1 have the kind of adjustability you are referring to.
Please note however that “similar” does not mean the same. Being familiar with all three products, I have found the results using PureRaw are very significantly better than its competition. It could be even better if the DxO added the ability to manually adjust the settings like in PhotoLab.