Finally, I’ve upgraded my Canon 10D.  I recently purchased the Canon 7D with Canon 10-22 lens.  The 7D camera is awesome.  I would like to have purchased the 5D, but the price difference was too high.

My 10D raw conversion workflow is no longer sufficient with my new camera.  So, I set out to determine which popular software can meet my objective:

* Produce the best possible jpg images, with minimal effort, as fast as reasonably possible.

A little web research and I had decided the top 3 software packages for me were:

1.  Aperture 3 (Mac only)
2.  Bibble Pro 5 (Windows, Mac, Linux)
3.  Lightroom 3 (Windows, Mac)

This comparison is not scientific and the results are subjective.  I’m sure I could get better results from all 3 packages with more tweaking.  But, that would defeat my objective of minimal effort.  If I really want to get tweak happy on a single photo, I’d probably use Photoshop anyway.

If you’d like to run your own tests … here are links to my original Canon 7d raw images.

original-girl.cr2
original-noise.cr2

I prefer the skin tone and detail I got from lightroom.  Aperture looked blown out and bibble looked washed out.

Here is the 1:1 pixel detail from each raw converion.  Aperture created extra noise.  Bibble looks too soft.  Lightroom looks best.

Lightroom is the clear winner when it comes to noise reduction.  This photo was shot in low light at 1250 ISO and had plenty of noise.  Lightroom makes the image look as if I had shot at 100 ISO!  Bibble’s noise ninja did a good job, but has fewer controls.  Aperture didn’t improve noise much at all.

Conclusion:

For me, Lightroom definitely produces the best images with minimal effort. When speed is most important and your willing to sacrifice some image quality, Bibble is the fastest by a wide margin. Aperture can produce great results, but I think it takes too much tweaking and the interface feels slowest.