Hecate wrote …
I’ve just started to use Rawshooter and I had been
thinking about trying out C1 Pro. Now I probably won’t bother.
I think you should still try it out, for many images I prefer C1 to RSE due to the colors. Here are at least three advantages C1 has … RSE has a tendency to not refresh the screen properly if you’re changing the window while an image is resizing, which pushes the Folders window up under the menu bar so you can’t reach all your files. The "fix" for this is to uninstall, delete all the RSE folders and edit your registry, then re-install, which seems a bit extreme for a simple screen refresh. Also, C1 has a wider range of color tones available for many cameras (especially the Canon Pro models I’m using) … when RSE’s profile is ‘right’ for your image it’s great but change the tone curves in the ‘appearance’ tab and you’ll see some weird looking colors. In particular the Magne Nielsen profiles are excellent, and support for the Canon 1Ds includes five different custom skin tones, for example. RSE has nothing like this (yet). Also, C1 shows a lot more of the EXIF data than RSE, which I rely on. For example, the aggregate # of total shutter actuations is shown for the Canon Pro models and C1 … with RSE you get very little EXIF info beyond the basic ISO, aperture, shutter speed and focal length data.
So it’s worth trying C1 out … you can try Pro for 30 days and LE for 15 days, no restrictions … the conversion quality is identical for the two versions but Pro offers tethering, arbitrary rotation, resizing, allows for custom curve creation, and has CMYK support (no doubt I’ve left off a few other features but those are the main ones I remember). I think people with Photoshop are mainly profiting from tethered operation but you’re paying closer to $500 (Pro) than $100 (LE) and to most it’s not worth it.
Note that RSE has very aggressive sharpening and saturation defaults, which makes the images ‘pop’ at default settings but you can get the same thing with C1 or CS RAW if you wish … for example, someone tested and found that the default sharpness settings for RSE are matched by these settings: Set CO sharpening to amount 18, radius 3, Noise reduction slider in preferences set to the least amount. In CS2 apply the noise reduction filter with all noise reduction sliders set to 0 (zero) and detail sharpening set to ~60. These give the same sharpness as the default RSE settings.
Here’s a list of RSE features that I feel are superior to what C1 has to offer (cut/paste from an email to C1 when C1 asked for suggestions for their next revision) … YMMV as to what’s important to your workflow, but despite these ‘nice to haves’ I still use C1 a lot too ….
1) Snapshots let you freeze the image at any given group of settings, then make more changes and take another snapshot etc. By clicking a tab you can then display the original vs the changed preview at any point you’ve saved off. C1 has nothing like this and it’s very handy.
2) I’m not a fan of auto-anything but the auto exposure does a good job
of getting you real close real fast, at least on the images I tried it on.
3) With C1 you get clean previews at 25% or 100% (after a delay while the preview is regenerated) but not at the intermediate views (50 or 75%). With RSE you get clean non-pixelated previews at any %, just like with ACR. Nice. Big advantage to RSE.
4) "Fill Light" works like the shadow part of Photoshop’s Shadow/Highlight tool and there is no comparable tool in C1.
5) The preview files are less than half the size of the C1 preview files, which is a big deal to me when traveling and checking several thousand files on a laptop.
Just my thoughts after using both programs quite a bit … I don’t think it’s as cut and dried as Hannah does and I still use both programs.
Bill