It'll be interesting to see where RAW converters will be heading.
Honestly I don't really see the point of a full auto-correction for instance. A distortion level of -say- 2% for wide angles and %1 for tele is perfectly fine most of the time. This way you wouldn't sacrifice too much information and avoid "overstretching" the corners (which cannot be recovered). A similar discussion applies to vignetting. Zero vignetting isn't really needed either - 0.5 to 0.75EV is acceptable. I also think that DxO's approach with local sharpness optimization is rather smart - thus the softer corners are sharpened more than the center for instances.
Of course, this doesn't make our own job any easier since a good portion of the IQ is the responsibility of the RAW converter. As the recent Sony discussion is showing, people are already getting confused by our "raw" finding compared to what they actually experience. A viable discussion here. However, we just can't discuss the end results across 5 different RAW converters (-versions).
As for image management - that's what I always hated in Lightroom. Postprocessing and image management are two completely different things altogether. Personally I just don't want to have them linked in a single application. I think that the current management tools are all already outdated. e.g. I would prefer to archive most of my images on Amazon Glacier (cloud) with some of the "hotter" images on Amazon S3 whereas the best you can do these days is plain storage to cloud disks. Most are still very local disk-centric.
Honestly I don't really see the point of a full auto-correction for instance. A distortion level of -say- 2% for wide angles and %1 for tele is perfectly fine most of the time. This way you wouldn't sacrifice too much information and avoid "overstretching" the corners (which cannot be recovered). A similar discussion applies to vignetting. Zero vignetting isn't really needed either - 0.5 to 0.75EV is acceptable. I also think that DxO's approach with local sharpness optimization is rather smart - thus the softer corners are sharpened more than the center for instances.
Of course, this doesn't make our own job any easier since a good portion of the IQ is the responsibility of the RAW converter. As the recent Sony discussion is showing, people are already getting confused by our "raw" finding compared to what they actually experience. A viable discussion here. However, we just can't discuss the end results across 5 different RAW converters (-versions).
As for image management - that's what I always hated in Lightroom. Postprocessing and image management are two completely different things altogether. Personally I just don't want to have them linked in a single application. I think that the current management tools are all already outdated. e.g. I would prefer to archive most of my images on Amazon Glacier (cloud) with some of the "hotter" images on Amazon S3 whereas the best you can do these days is plain storage to cloud disks. Most are still very local disk-centric.