I have a license for PL7 and have been trial-ing some other photo editing software. That software is pretty good but it seems to lack the quality of some of the basic Dxo adjustments such as lens distortion, denoising, lens softness and so on. I thought that PureRaw might be the solution to that problem but was wondering if there is anything that PureRaw can do that PhotoLab itself can not.
There seems to be PL adjustments for all of the PureRaw adjustments so I thought I might just create a PureRaw workspace and use it instead of PureRaw. This seemed an option because an upgrade to PhotoLab (for which I have an earlier license) is less expensive than the purchase of PureRaw (for which I do not have a prior license and thus would have to pay the full price).
The strange thing seems to be that the PhotoLab output using the PureRaw workspace does not seem quite the same as the PureRaw output with the photos lacking some of the sharpness and contrast of the PureRaw versions. Is there something I am missing? Should I not get the same quality output using PL to emulate the PR settings? Or am I missing something?
Effectively, PureRAW is a sub-set of PhotoLab … PL gives you ultimate control over all RAW processing settings - whereas, PureRAW is a just the basic RAW processing engine, with a number of fixed settings.
PureRAW can set sharpening only coarsely. Default setting to be too aggressive imo and the next setting too soft. → Try different settings and see which suits you best.
PureRAW is occasionally used as an early adopter for new features that will make their appearance in PhotoLab a few months later…and a few refinements and fixes.
Given that upgrading from PL/ is less costly than getting into PureRAW feels like a o-brainer for me. Upgrade PL…being aware of its raised requirements for AI masking and some of its denoising.
Why not trial PL9? Test thoroughly, there’s one trial only. Don’t waste it.
This limitation is no longer relevant:
In PureRAW 5, Lens Sharpness Optimization can be set to either predefined values (Standard, Strong, etc.) or to use the slider, which allows you to choose any value…
That is what I always assumed, and I created a PL workspace that included as active only those items that PureRaw uses and I expected the output to be the same. Perhaps PL in that workspace is actually more sensitive to differences in photos and produces a more accurate output.
In any case it does not make much sense to me to spend more for PhotoRaw than for Photo Lab itself, so I guess I will just upgrade and use it as a PhotoRaw replacement until I decide about this other software.