I had planned to buy a Q2 Monochrom over the standard Leica Q2. I love shooting mono, have other cameras for colour work and the Q2M offers better low light performance and a bit more detail from its sensor. The “pure mono” experience appeals to me.
It is apparent from other forum posts that DXO will never support mono sensors because prime noise reduction uses colour information to work its magic. That being the case, unless I am to ditch Photolab (don’t want to do that) I may as well buy the standard Leica Q2 - Deep Prime probably compensates for the 1-2 stops highest ISO noise advantage of the Q2M. Additionally the colour sensor gives the benefit of choosing a colour filter effect in post, rather than committing to a screw-in filter whilst shooting. I currently develop my colour raw files in Photolab, do local adjustments and then send a tiff to Silver FX.
Thoughts anyone? Have I missed anything obvious? Anyone in the forum with a Q2M using other software?
I sold my Leica Q and purchased a Q2 Monochrom about a year and half ago. I have been using Capture One, which works very well with the the DNG files from the Q2M. I bought DXO PhotoLab for some of my other cameras but wished to get my monochrome raw files working with DXO software. The work around I have been experimenting with, is to convert the Q2M DNG’s into tiff files by using GraphicConverter 11 (a long established software from Germany) and then you can work with them in DXO PhotoLab and Nik. It’s not as good as working directly with the DNG files but it seems to be workable.
One thing you could try is to download a free trial version of GraphicConverter 11, get some Q2M DNG’s somewhere and see for yourself.
Thank you for the suggestion Greg, I’ll take a look. I bought the Q2M (delighted with it) and have been trying to edit with Lightroom and Silver FX Pro. The problem with that combination is that Lightroom gets progressively slower with each edit to the point that my computer needs rebooting (2019 iMac). So I changed to just doing a basic exposure edit in Lightroom on the imports plus a little clarity, then exporting as tiffs to Photolab where I can do more editing and finally send to Nik Silver FX. No speed issues going that route.