RAW Developer Comparison

Choice. There are so many RAW developers out there. And they all have rabid fan bases, and apparently unique rendering. How to choose?

Here are my house rules:

• Must run on Windows or Linux
• Must run acceptably on my Surface tablet
• Must run acceptably with files on a network share
• Must support my past and present cameras (Fuji X-E3, Ricoh GR, Pentax Q7, Nikon D7000)

In contrast to most other comparisons on the 'net¹, I won't concern myself too much with sharpness and noise reduction and demosaicing. I have yet to see a photograph that was ruined by them, and most RAW developers seem to do a sufficient job at them.

I would prefer a file-based workflow with edits stored alongside the RAW files², and I would prefer a perpetual license instead of a rental contract, but I'm willing to compromize on both if it's worth it³.

Obviously, I am a lot more proficient in my current tool, Darktable, than in any of the others. But for this test, I'm explicitly not doing anything particularly artistic; merely some highlight recovery, shadow recovery, and local white balance adjustments. By limiting myself to these edits, I hope to get an unbiased idea of the various RAW developer's implementations, without needing to ask the endless “what if” of what else I could have done. That said, I will leave all other adjustments on their default settings, to still get an impression of the general look of the programs.

• Darktable 3.0.2 (Free)
  Free, works on Linux, very familiar to me. Allegedly, not particularly fast, with a confusing user interface.
• Adobe Lightroom Classic CC 7.5 ($10/month)
  Probably the most widespread tool. Somehow unappealing to me. Currently only available at a subscription price, but there is a “free” version available through my university.
• Capture One 20.0.4 ($29/month or $350)
  Enormously expensive, even with the educational discount. Allegedly the best default color rendition, particularly for Fuji cameras.
• RawTherapee 5.8 (Free)
  Free, works on Linux. Allegedly extremely high image quality, but no local adjustments whatsoever.
• Luminar 4.2.0 ($90)
  A rather new developer, with fancy AI features such as automatic sky replacements. Not exactly what I'm looking for, but we'll see about its “normal” RAW development chops.
• ON1 Photo RAW 2020.1 ($100)
  Another highly regarded developer with rather traditional tools. This one works straight on files in the file system, though, which is highly attractive to me.
• ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2020 13.0 ($9/month or $150)
  Wasn't this a fancy image viewer a few years ago? Apparently it's now a RAW developer.
• Exposure X5 5.2.1.211 ($120)
  Allegedly super fast, with great sharpening and noise removal.
• Photo Ninja 1.3.7a ($130)
  Another new developer, borne out of a dedicated noise reduction tool, and with an emphasis on “intelligent” tools.
• Silkypix Developer Studio Pro 10.0.3.0 ($200)
  A Japanese RAW developer. I wasn't aware of it until a comment brought it up, thank you for that! And I mention its country of origin, as the English translation is a bit rough sometimes. Quite unusual in its feature set.
• Zoner Photo Studio X 19.2103.2.317 ($50/year)
  A somewhat unknown RAW developer. So much so that I only stumbled upon it one year after the original article. A true Windows-only product that feels at home in Windows like none of the other programs in this list.
• DXO Photolab ($220)
  For the longest time, did not support Fuji X-Trans files. But this has changed in version 5, and I am eager to try it out!

Not considered:

• Aftershot ($80)
  Works on Linux, but doesn't support my Fuji camera because it hasn't been updated in ages.
• Iridient Developer, Raw Power, Aperture
  Mac only
• Affinity Photo ($55)
  Cheap, awesome, but not non-destructive. I'll probably buy this regardless in a sale, just because it's so affordable.

In terms of price, it is hard to argue with free. But considering the price of my other photographic equipment, most prices in this list are pretty adequate. Except for Capture One (and maybe Silkypix). $350 ($200) is a hard price to swallow.

I prepared 18 RAW images for this test, and made a plan of what exactly I would do with every one of them. Then I developed them all in each of the RAW editors. I will only show excerpts here, both to keep private the pictures I don't want to share, and to keep this already long post from exploding.

Also, I mostly show difficult files here that have some obvious challenge. This is because I am usually quite satisfied with my cameras' JPEGs in easy cases, and don't bother with RAW development.

I went into this expecting to find Lightroom and Capture One to be vastly faster in use than Darktable, particularly on my Surface tablet. I also expected better out-of-the-box image beauty, large differences in user interfaces, and for most tools to have very few graphical artifacts. Surprisingly, however, almost every tool showed obvious artifacts of one kind or another, and few tools were actually faster than Darktable. In terms of tools, I found most tools look very similar, yet function vastly differently.

Simple saturation and contrast adjustments, a bit of local contrast, and rarely some dodging and burning or local color adjustments are apparently all I do most of the time, and this generally works well and similarly in all of these tools. However, that is not to say that the individual sliders do remotely the same thing in different tools. So confused was I by this that I measured the response curves of several tools, and they indeed did entirely different things. In one tool, Highlights pushes the upper half of the tone curve. In another, even the darkest shadows are affected a little bit. In yet another, Highlights burns out to the upper quarter of the tone curve if pushed all the way. Sometimes the white point stays white, sometimes it moves. Sometimes it only moves if the slider is pushed past half-way. And that's not even taking into account their different blending behavior and value scales; these sliders may look the same, but there hides complexity beyond measure.

And I did find a surprising amount of graphical artifacts in these programs, particularly the color bleeding in Exposure, and the highlight recovery problems in Luminar and ON1, as well as a number of smaller issues. The one program that truly stands out here is Lightroom, which is more robust to artifacts than any other tool in this list, seemingly due to some significant image-adaptive intelligence under the hood.

I have strong mixed feelings about Capture One. On the one hand, it has one of the most attractive user interfaces of all these tools. On the other, its color renditions are very opinionated, and not my favorite. I love how it reads and applies Fuji color profiles as shot, but then it doesn't apply the Fuji shadow/highlight adjustments and crushes the shadows unnecessarily. And while its color tools sure look nice, their functionality is not that much different than the other developers', and they are spread out needlessly across several tabs. And that price.

Playing around with Luminar was deeply impressive. There are a ton of magic and automatic features in there. But as cool as AI sky replacement is, it simply has no place in my toolbelt, and the general speed of the UI are a big minus.

I like ON1. It's relatively affordable, works with simple JSON sidecar files instead of a library, has reasonable tools, and impressive effects. It can even mimic the look of the embedded JPEG and supports Fuji film simulations. Not quite on the graphical level as Capture One or Lightroom, but very close. And it even runs acceptably fast on my Surface tablet.

Exposure is another program I could like a lot, but the color bleeding and graphical artifacts are just not up to snuff. In one example, it entirely failed to guess colors from an underexposed bar scene (not shown). In another it bled colors out onto adjacent objects for no reason. And white balance sometimes changed lightness as well as colors. I read that this might be a graphics driver issue, but regardless, it shook my confidence in Exposure.

ACDSee was a real surprise to me. I seem to remember it as a fast image viewer, but apparently it is (now?) an impressive RAW editor as well. There is a lot to like about this tool. The magic brush for local adjustments is a particularly noteworthy touch, as well as very robust healing tools. Alas, I found the UI rather slow, and it failed on exporting a few files. I'll try again in a year or so.

I was only made aware of Silkypix through a comment after the post had already been published (thank you!). And what I read on the website made me quite excited! Its tools stray somewhat from the Lightroom-inspired norm, which is a very good thing in some cases, such as the hue-priority highlight recovery. It also works on plain files, and seems to have outstanding Fuji film simulations. Alas, it was very slow to use, and not suitable for my Surface tablet.

I had tried RawTherapee a few times in the past, and was always frustrated by its lack of local adjustments, and the need to view things at 100% to see some adjustments. On the other hand, it can match the embedded JPEG tones, and has quite a number of impressive algorithms. Still, it does not appeal to me. But it's still an amazing achievement and a pretty inspiring community as well.

Photo Ninja is a curious program. Certainly not because of its ease of use, or speed of operation, or image quality. But because it did most things almost correctly automatically. That's not what I am looking for, but it is truly impressive.

I only discovered Zoner Photo about a year after this post was originally published. But I was impressed by what I found: It is a well-designed program with a solid array of tools, even including a pixel editor. And rather affordable, too. Curiously, Zoner Photo does not officially support some of my cameras, but can utilize the free Adobe DNG converter to make them readable on the fly, without creating a separate copy. Smart!

DxO PhotoLabs was another latecomer, which only started supporting Fuji X-Trans files in late 2021. I downloaded it on the day it became available, and was duly impressed. Its tools are less streamlined than in other programs, but seem to be of great algorithmic quality; there was hardly a lightness reversal or halo to be found, the bane of many a cheaper product. I am deeply intrigued.

And Lightroom. As I said, I somehow do not like Lightroom. Maybe because I like to be “different”, or because I associate Adobe too much with bloated software. But I have to say, Lightroom surprised me. While its tools are sometimes in weird locations, it is highly streamlined for a very fast workflow, and it deserves my highest praise for being outstandingly robust against artifacts. But I still don't like it.

Which leaves Darktable. This is a tool I am deeply familiar with, and have used for several years. Yet until this day, I never realized just how strange its tools are compared to the other programs. How weird Filmic RGB must feel if you are used to shadows and highlights sliders, and how alien the graph-based color zones and tone equalizer and contrast equalizer must seem.

Yet, in direct comparison, I find Darktable's tools equally efficient at solving problems, even if the solutions are sometimes a bit different from its Lightroom-inspired peers. One tool in particular I want to emphasize: Color Zones. At first glance, it looks like your standard HSL tool that allows brightness, saturation, and hue changes by color (albeit as a graph instead of sliders). But then you discover the “select-by” switch, and realize that you can modify colors by lightness and saturation, as well as hue. I use this frequently to saturate shadows, which is a great effect I haven't seen in any other program.

No doubt other programs have cool features, too, but Darktable (and RawTherapee) seem uniquely open about their inner workings. And this brings joy to me, on a level the closed, artistic programs can't match. I like graphs, and maths. I'm weird like that.

But what really prompted this whole comparison blog post was my frustration with Darktable's speed. Particularly on my 4K screen, it is not the fastest program out there. And the AMD/OpenCL situation on Linux is still a travesty, which doesn't help. But I learned a thing during this experiment: You must work bottom-up through the rendering chain, if you want Darktable to be fast⁴. Which, in my case, usually means working through Lens Correction → Crop and Rotate → Exposure → Tone Equalizer → Contrast Equalizer → Color Balance → Filmic RGB → Color Zones. As long as I (mostly) edit things in this order, Darktable is fast enough, even on my Surface tablet.

Lastly, I have to say a few words about file management. Most programs here work on some kind of local library that stores all edits. The downside of this is that these libraries are hard to sync between computers, are hard to back up, and need to manually be kept in sync when file locations change. Notable exceptions here are Lightroom, Darktable, Exposure⁵, Silkypix⁵, RawTherapee, ON1, DxO, and Zoner, which keep their edits alongside the RAW files in little text “sidecar” files⁶. Thus even if their library goes out of sync or is lost, at least the edits are still there. To be honest, this is quite an important factor for me.

As for library management, my requirements are small: I want to filter by date, rating, and maybe camera or lens. These needs are met by all programs except possibly Luminar and Photo Ninja. I do most of my file management in external programs on camera import, and with the exported JPEGs, so this area of the RAW developers is not very important to me.

However, this comparison also highlighted just how useful sidecar files are to photo management. I might choose different RAW developers over the years, and my photo management solutions might change over time as well. But as long as all edits are stored in simple text files next to the RAW file, I can rest safe in the knowledge that my edits will never be lost. This is a serious downside to ACDSee, Capture One, Luminar, and Photo Ninja, who keep edits secretly⁷ in their opaque databases.

I also timed my work with every one of these programs. Quite surprisingly, I couldn't find any significant differences between programs. Darktable's workflows, for example, are sometimes entirely different from other tools; but if you know what you're doing the path from identifying a problem to fixing it is still similarly straight-forward and fast. And there is no less experimentation until I arrive at a look I like.

Thus, I am left with Darktable, Lightroom, and ON1. And theoretically Capture One, but that price is just too high for me. If Capture One were $100 instead of $350, I would probably switch to it. Even educational pricing is only available for rentals. I'll have to decline that. And despite all my praise for Lightroom, I still don't like it.

I'll probably buy ON1 at its current, discounted price ($50), and see how I like it in actual daily use⁸. But at the same time. I'll also stick with Darktable on my Linux machine, at least for more complicated edits. I now know that Darktable can dance with the best of them, which is mighty impressive for a piece of free software.

With all that said and done, I have learned a lot about RAW development during this experiment. Regardless of which tool I end up sticking with, this has been a fascinating comparison. We'll see how long I can resist the urge to compare this time.

Addendum: Customer Support

So far, I have been in contact with the Customer Support people of ON1, Capture One, and Zoner. And I must say, ON1 and Zoner were incredibly pleasant and quick and helpful, while Capture One seemed almost reluctant to help. This is actually a big plus for ON1 and Zoner, and kind of big turnoff for Capture One.

Update: Silkypix

I added Silkypix to the comparison, thanks to kind comments underneath this post.

Update: Luminar Local Adjustments

I was made aware that Luminar does indeed have local adjustments, they were merely in such an uncommon place that I hadn't found the initially.

Update: Zoner Photo

One year after the original post, I added Zoner Photo to the comparison.

Update: DxO PhotoLab

One-and-a-half years after the original post, DxO Photo Labs added support for Fuji files, so I added them to the comparison.