Lightroom quality of life improvements desperately needed

DxO PureRAW
1

Let’s compare purerraw 4 with Lightroom’s builtin denoise. When I want to process an image with purerraw 4 I need to

  1. Click “preview and process in purerraw”
  2. Adjust settings in purerraw and confirm (all good until now)

Now purerraw adds the new image to LR, stacks it with the original, adds it to a new collection and switches to the collection

  1. Somehow go from the collection that purerraw created to back where i was before (why on earth would I want a collection and leave the place I am currently working on?)
  2. Change the stack order because purerraw somehow stacks the new image AFTER the original one
  3. copy all edit settings from the original photo
  4. paste the settings to the processed photo AND undo settings that don’t make sense anymore (e.g. sharpening)

Uff, that was annoying. Now let’s compare with lightrooms builtin denoise:

  1. Pick denoise in the menu (same as before)
  2. Pick options in the dialog and confirm (same as before)

And now I am done. All the remaining steps are already done by lightroom. This is so much less hassle that I find myself picking LR denoise over purerraw half of the time just because of all the manual steps with purerraw.

In think the LR Lua API allows changing the stack order and copying edit settings, so can something be done about this?

Thanks!

2

I have not used PureRAW very much but simple workflow is:

  1. Just process all files/whole folder in a batch in PureRAW.
  2. THEN import resulting DNGs to Lightroom and adjust as needed.
3

Yes, I agree that would solve my usability issues, but especially for wildlife, where I usually shoot in bursts and have a very low ratio of shot photos to usable photos, this would also mean:

  1. waiting quite some time for all pictures to be processed
  2. having a lot of unused processed pictures around that need to be cleaned up
  3. no manual tweaking of dxo options per picture (granted, this is mostly sharpness)

And as a more meta argument, If DXO wants to pick up LR users as the “better denoise” alternative, it should support the workflow supported by LR denoise.

4

Lightroom and PL/PR are two totally different applications in how they work and apply their processes.
LR is a debayer based pixel editor where PL/PR are parametric based ones which processes the raw data long before it’s debayered - which is done only at export.

Application of DxO processing in LR own processing path is not viable.

5

But this is exactly the use case of PR, isn’t it?

The corresponding LR feature is their enhanced denoise which is Adobe’s take on processing intensive demosaicing combined with AI noise reduction (granted, PR does a bit more like sharpening and lens correction).

6

True enough.
For 1 I would say a lot of photographers use a separate culling app (PhotoMechanic) before importing images to main processing app.
2 This is a problem for many advanced workflows – High end separate process creates yet another batch of new 200 MB source files. Now do I throw the originals to trash or keep them? So many advanced editing apps create always a new version for each feature applied. That is why I would prefer to do all adjustments in one app – but all necessary steps are not yet available in one app.

7

The collection handling by DXO just does whatever it wants and creates pointless collections endlessly. Have raised with support as there is clearly a bug (put in a named collection, it works once but reverts the next time) but had zero response.

Likewise just tried using the “shoots” folder as an option - works the first time and then reverts to default of popping out unwanted collections