I’m still figuring out what is the most capable, handy, pleasant and fast(est) RAW converter. Not all qualities are equally important. Although I like the RAW conversion quality of Nikon’s ViewNX-i; it’s speeds, or better is slowness is becoming more and more annoying.
Originating from the Nikon ViewNX-i RAW converter, I’m still searching. The last few weeks I’ve compared RawTherapee 5.3 ‘Alberto version’, Darktable 2.4.0, ViewNX-i 1.2.10, Adobe CameraRAW 10.1 (with OpenCL GPU support on) conversion speeds, with some interesting results.
System I use: a Windows Pro 64bit 1709, 24GB RAM, i7 980X CPU, AMD R9 270x GPU with 2GB RAM. SSD system disk, HDD data disks (SATA 3)
I’ve setup a test directory with 200x Nikon D800E NEF (RAW) files. Total 10.5GB of RAW data.
Converted to 8 bit TIFF files, sRGB without any further special adjustments.
The resulting TIFF files are about 106MB each, total output data approx. 20.2GB
ViewNX-i inputdir on HDD1 → outputdir on HDD2 – 24 minutes
ViewNX-i inputdir on SSD1 → outputdir on SSD2 – canceled after >35minutes (! very strange)
RT 5.3 inputdir on HDD1 → outputdir on HDD2 – 12 minutes
RT 5.3 inputdir on SSD1 → outputdir on SSD2 – 12 minutes (no difference with HDD)
DT 2.4.0 crashes after a few minutes, tried several times.
darktable.exe caused an Access Violation at location 000000006C68FA9F in module libexiv2.dll Reading from location 000000001A8260C0.
Fault bucket , type 0
Event Name: RADAR_PRE_LEAK_64
CameraRaw 10.1 inputdir on HDD1 → outputdir on HDD2 – 7 minutes
CameraRaw 10.1 inputdir on SSD1 → outputdir on SSD2 – 7 minutes
So Nikon’s ViewNX-i is definitely the slowest converter. RawTherapee is about twice as fast, and Adobe’s CameraRaw is even faster. I think the OpenCL GPU acceleration does a good job for CameraRaw. Just a pitty that RawTherapee doesn’t use GPU acceleration yet… (hint, hint slight_smile: )
Remarkable is also that the conversion speed is not depending on the type of storage device! I can’t see any difference between SSD or HDD conversion speeds. Although when I do a straight copy of the files, the transferspeed difference is very obvious! (of course) and SSD is lot faster.
I can’t judge the TIFF output results from each converter yet. That will take some time for me to figure out what I like most/best/better…
As regarding to each GUI:
I still like the rather ‘simplicity’ of the ViewNX-i GUI, just some basic settings, nothing overcrowded, just a few clicks and off you go with the TIFF conversion.
The RT GUI is loaded with features; that’s a good, but also a confusing thing. You don’t know where to start/look/click.
The same applies for darktable.
And as for CameraRaw; I don’t especially like that ui either. Although I’m familiar with Adobe since PS2.