Well I dont have a good comparison Alan. I downloaded a trial because I heard the demosaicing routine in C1 was superior. I didnt believe it. But I stand corrected. Seeing what detail Lightroom (2.6) created from my raws and seeing what detail C1 created from my raws: it was like shooting with better gear (and I shoot 5D MkII L glass anyway). I was BLOWN AWAY.


Fine details like fabric textures were all intact in C1. And that is before I made corrections to things like sharpness and stuff. Just the basic rendering of a raw in C1 blew me away.





That said, it was a complicated program to work with. I remember hating Lightroom's interface when I first learned working with it (v1.3 I think a while back). I have grown used to it now. I suspect if you grow used to C1 you will not notice it after a while.


However I think C1 is slow. And I mean 'wait seconds to see simple color hue change' slow. It will re-render everything and take its time. And my system is pretty fast I tell you. The sheer slowness of it makes me wonder about a possible future workflow: I saw an article online (I cant remember where) where somebody made sure he got the best possible raw render out of C1, saved it as a 16 bit tiff to an output folder, that Lightroom was set to automatically import, and move from there. He used C1 to get the most out of his raws (which is basically what the program is for: it is not very focused on extensive postprocessing like Lightroom is) and then do the rest in Lightroom. He said differences in Lightroom between the source raw and the 16 bit C1 tiff were so minimal he did it like that and with good results.


I am doing a fashion shoot this Tuesday, and will postproces this way to see if it works for me.

Note: I hear reports that Lightroom 3 (coming somewhere in 2010, with an incomplete beta available publically for testing) has improved demosaicing routines and will render much better files than version two did. Somebody told me 'it was getting very close to C1' so I am curious to see if this is true (yet I refuse to do beta software so I will wait for a final. And, knowing Adobe's track record, possibly even wait for the first incremental update after the initial release of Lightroom 3).