Digital Camera Utilty 4 Tutorial

Hi Peter, I have been somewhat of a lone ranger around here recently in defending the virtues of PCU4, so I would be delighted to discuss it and offer the experience I have gained - we'll need to keep a careful lookout though for the charge of the Lightroom brigade, as they may ambush us at any moment

I don't think I'm up for offering a full blown tutorial, but I'll tell you a bit about the software and how it can be best used in a workflow.

Lets be clear - Lightroom is obviously a great 'all-in-one' solution for many photographers, and also obviously it can output high quality images. But it is essentially a 'one-stop-shop' approach, containing an image management module, a RAW converter and image editor in one.

PCU4 really only provides the RAW converter part of that, at least in a fully fledged way - there are limited photo management and 'editing' features, but most of us will choose to use other software for these aspects. However, it does provide a very high quality RAW conversion from Pentax PEF & DNG files, so it is a great choice, and free as well

There are two key things to appreciate about PCU4 : firstly, it uses the processing 'engines' and algorithams of the Japanese product 'Silkypix Developer Studio', a professional grade RAW conversion program. PCU4 does not have the same complex graphical interfaces for its controls (using mostly simple sliders), but its output quality is potentially the same.

Secondly, PCU4 contains duplicate controls for a number of Pentax specific camera settings, such as lens corrections and 'Custom Image settings' such as Landscape / Natural / Portrait / saturation / sharpness / high & low contrast etc etc. This means that you have access to these specific Pentax image adjustments in the software, so when shooting RAW you don't need to bother with setting them up on the camera before shooting

If you do have any of these settings applied on the camera, they will be there by default already set in PCU4 when the shot is opened, saving considerable time if shooting a whole batch of the same type.

These Pentax specific camera settings are tailored to the dynamic range and capabilities of the camera, so do provide high quality adjustments to the pictures, so well worth using in my opinion - in PCU4 you can tweak them to your hearts content until its perfect without making any permanent changes to the original RAW file, and of course even after 'saving as' and producing a TIFF or JPEG output you can always just go back and reopen the original RAW and 'Re-Develop' it again in a different way!

I love the quality of the pictures I'm now producing using PCU4, I believe it gets the best out of my Pentax K7. I'm out of time tonight, but if this has been interesting, let me know and I'll write a bit more soon about a kind of step by step approach to working on a shot in PCU4.