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Best viewing software for Leica M files


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A 'problem' with DNG files appears to be the lack of a large, embedded Jpeg file, which means any viewing application needs to build previews and/or render the files on the fly.

 

Lightroom is included with the M9 (not sure if it was with the M8) and IMO does a pretty decent job, but I don't consider it to be fast at generating 100% previews. But then, I'm on an i7 iMac with a regular 7200 rpm drive. It will likely be faster on an SSD based system, or one where the LR catalog and cache can be moved off the OS drive (the cache can be assigned to a separate drive).

 

For my purposes I shoot DNG + Jpeg Basic and use Photo Mechanic for the initial edit. Photo Mechanic is kind of a specialized photo editing tool aimed at photojournalists or anyone who needs to efficiently apply a lot of metadata to images (LR can also do this). But it also renders files quickly, especially JPEGs, and I find I can flip through the DNG+Jpeg pairs and judge focus very quickly with it. For DNG files Photo Mechanic will generate the full 100% preview on my system within 1-2 seconds whereas Lightroom takes about 5 seconds, so it's a huge difference. However, Photo Mechanic is much faster when working with Jpegs - it's literally instantaneous, hence the reason I shoot DNG + JPEG. It saves a lot of time during the culling stage of editing by not having to wait for the computer to generate 100% previews.

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