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I am thinking of moving to using Raw Power for Raw processing of photos imported to Apple Photos (Mac) but after reading a lot of the info on this site and support pages I am still confused about how Raw Power will overcome the limitations of Photos that Nik outlined in his article on Tidbits (‘The Ins and outs of non-destructive editing in Photos for Mac and IOS’). In that article, Nik indicated that when third party editors send an edited image file back to Photos it is sending a jpeg. So, when the user might then want to export that file for further editing in another editing app, even if they choose, say, a 16bit TIFF file, Photos is creating that TIFF file from an 8bit jpeg. It’s not clear to me that editing first in Raw Power, either as a plug-in or stand alone app, overcomes this problem. Does the integration of the stand-alone version of Raw Power with the Photos library somehow get around this problem?
If I expect to use third-party editor apps as well as Raw Power should I just forget ingesting the original Raw files into Photos? Should I ingest into a Finder folder and let Raw Power process the file, then export to a third party editor – i.e. completely bypass Photos – until I have a finally finished (edited) photo file, which could then be imported into Photos (using another file name than the original)?
Thanks for any and all clarifications.
When you use extensions, they save JPEGs into the photo library. When you ask Photos to export, it will just use that JPEG. It does not go back to the original + invoke the extension.
When you are using RAW Power as a standalone app, it is still writing a JPEG into the photo library. However, if you use RAW Power to export, it will generate new images from the original RAW. So, you get full fidelity. That, of course, is only true for images edited in RAW Power. If you edit an image in Photos (or any other editor that uses the photo library) and then export that image in RAW Power, it will use the JPEG because it has no way to invoke Photos to render the image from the original.
If you plan to use multiple editors through the Photo library, then you are inevitably going to be stuck with a JPEG at some point. If you want the highest quality then use RAW Power to edit the image (standalone), export a TIFF and then edit that in the other app. I suppose you could import the TIFF into Photos and then use a separate extension to edit (but again, you have a JPEG at the end).
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