The inflexibility of infinite options

This is a diatribe about getting locked into RAW converters. Take it with an even larger pinch of salt than usually recommend for my rants. Yes, I know: RAW liberates us. We can fix anything in the mix. We can change the exposure, change the colour balance, obtain radically different versions of the same source. How very unlike film, where most of these parameters are set in stone the moment we press the shutter. With RAW, we can keep our options open. This is not a bad thing. Far from it, but there is another side to the coin of infinite choice - infinite options. What, exactly, is the image we have captured ? When we print a processed file, this is just one of these variants. Again, this is nothing new. The same could be said of printing from a negative. But in the case of a negative, we have one negative and many prints, a fairly easy combination to manage. With RAW, we have any number of variants from the RAW converter, various post-processed versions of each of these in Photoshop, and the prints. How do we trace a print back to the source ? And this assumes just one RAW converter, whereas for most if not all formats, there are many choices. For Olympus E-1 ORFs, there are two converters from Olympus, two from Adobe, CaptureOne, Bibble, RAW Developer, Pixmantec, Silkypix, and more obscure options such as Silverfast. There are probably at least 15 options. Most people have their favourite, but there seems to be general agreement that there are merits to using several. There is a basic difference between a RAW file and a "traditional" file such as TIFF or PSD: RAW files are never touched. RAW converters record a list of settings which, when applied to the RAW, are used to create an output file. Different applications use different strategies to store these settings. Some, like Adobe Camera RAW, or Olympus Studio, save a separate file for each image. Others, like CaptureOne, have a concept of a session, and store all settings for all images in the session in a sesssion folder, managed by a session file. Most, if not all, at least try to impose their own organisation solution on you, CaptureOne in particular. The latest idea, embodied in Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom, is to hide all this complexity from the user in a database-indexed file structure. In any case, what this means is that any work you do on a RAW image prior to converting it to a "fixed" format is essentially invisible outside of the converter environment it was created in. I cannot open a RAW file adjusted in CaptureOne in Lightroom and expect to see the effect of the adjustments (although when I first used Lightroom I was sufficiently flummoxed by the default settings to think that it was applying them!). I cannot browse a catalogue of RAW images in an application such as iView Media Pro and see any effect of such adjustments - even in the case of CaptureOne, which benefits from strong cross-marketing with iView. In fact, iView & PhaseOne have had to come up with some laughably convoluted suggested workflows to try to convince us that their association currently is anything other than marketing. So, in the past, when I could manage by digital assets from raw scan onwards in one place, now I cannot, and since there is a shift towards adjusting images prior to RAW conversion rather than afterwards, much of the power of a Digital Asset Management application is lost. In fact, if you want to use two or three alternative converters, then really you're on the road to Chaos City. Aperture can, and so we're told, Lightroom will, offer to sort all this out for us by integrating an end-to-end workflow, from RAW through to print. Aperture has some excellent ideas in the versioning, sorting and management front, and I daresay Lightroom will get around to copying, er, sorry integrating them soon. This is all well and good, providing you can meet two conditions: 1: you're starting with a blank slate 2: you're perfectly happy with the built-in RAW converter and always will be The first condition makes the reasonable assumption that once you've chosen a management solution, you don't want to use another one. However, say you have 10,000 RAW files currently in CaptureOne sessions. Either you're going to essentially treat them as history, and manage only the processed output files, thus throwing away the benefits of RAW, or you're going to have to bring them in to Aperture, one by one, and reapply settings to all of them - which, of course, are anyway going to take on a different characteristic to CaptureOne. This is a major pain, but I suppose it isn't a showstopper. The second, though, is more dangerous. For any pro or serious amateur photographer, a digital catalogue is a vital tool. These integrated tools offer great catalog functions, and you could soon be managing large libraries within them, discarding iView or Portfolio or Cumulus. But... what are going to do when iView launch MediaCapture 5, the fully integrated iView/PhaseOne tool which, all reviewers agree, offers outstanding, un-rivalled RAW conversion, with beautiful colour and detail ? Spend 6 months migrating ? Only to come back out of your computer room, haggard and blinking, to read news of Adobe's new Lightroom 8, which kills MediaCapture stone dead ? In the midst of the hype surrounding Lightroom and the associated, way over the top, vicious kicking of Aperture, raising these issues just opens me up to ridicule and insults on various forums. We shall see. Much as I would love to use either of these tools (and I do use Lightroom at present for LX-1 RAW), I am very wary of getting locked in. I'm sure companies like Extensis and iView are aware of both the problem and opportunity of the plethora of RAW converters, and I hope they'll come up with a solution - honestly, I'd find it much more useful if iView managed CaptureOne sessions rather than fonts - where RAW developers are essentially recast as plugins. Maybe we'll even seen a portable metadata standard format emerge, but I'm not holding my breath. There isn't really a solution to all this yet, unless it is to select one RAW converter and stick with it, or to accept that cataloging starts after the RAW conversion (more or less my current approach). Beware of integrated solutions. Mark my words, or surely thy Doom awaits.