Futureman said:
I thought it was like a lens. There's a proprietary AF algorithm that Canon and Nikon use, but 3rd party manufacturers can still release an AF lens that will work on the bodies.
Maybe I'm wrong though? Would I really see a huge return if I stopped only using Lightroom to edit my RAW files and instead used Canon's?
Sorta, in the sense that third party software can translate the RAW data into an image (provided you have the most recent updates that coincide with the camera model). White balance metadata is preserved, but everything else is not.
The only thing first party software does "better" is that it recognizes the settings you used in camera, and applies it to your RAW file. Say you are shooting and have the camera set to Standard mode with +2 contrast and +1 saturation - using first party software, those settings will already be set for you, and you will see on your screen an image that looks like the JPEG that the camera would have spit out had you been shooting in JPEG.
In Lightroom or other third party software, those contrast, saturation, etc settings are not applied. You gotta input all that yourself. This is why my workflow involves a global adjustment to nudge the photos in the general direction I want, then a finetuning inspection to individual photos to taste.
To give another example, Nikon's "Active D-Lighting" (similar to Canon's highlight priority) is a feature found on the newest models that will preserve highlights and boost shadows. Nikon's NX2 software can interpret this metadata from the RAW file and will apply it to your image. Lightroom has no idea what the hell "Active D-Lighting" is and will not even recognize it.
Using the "fill light" and the "recover" sliders in Lightroom will do the same thing, though. You just have to move the sliders yourself from the default position.
As for me, I don't like using Canon or Nikon's software because I think they are slow and Lightroom is so much better anyway. First party software may save me time by me not having to manually set the sliders myself, but I would waste time overall because of how slow they run compared to Lightroom. I would also miss out on Lightroom's awesome cataloging features and its integration with Photoshop.
One more thing - Since version 2.2 of Lightroom, Adobe created different camera profiles to sort of replicate the camera styles of Nikon and Canon. It's the last panel in the develop module. Play around and see if any of them please you.
Also - for those using Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW, copying and pasting develop settings and using the "sync" function to synchronize develop settings across multiple pictures saves a lot of time. For any given bunch of photos taken in the same lighting conditions and similar exposure values, edit the first one to how you like it, and sync those settings to the rest of the photos in the bunch.
