Personally my photography philosophy has always been plan well, shoot well and spend as less time as possible on the computer manipulating pictures. I tried my hands on various Adobe products like Elements & Photoshop in the past but I was never mentally inclined to manipulate pictures digitally to create something that I did not shoot.
For the simple edits that we all need to do on any RAW image like Color Temperature, Contrast, Color Cast control & lens perspective corrections I use Adobe Lightroom. But since the time I have been using my Hasselblad 500 C/M, I have used Hasselblad Phocus RAW Photo Editor a couple of times instead of Adobe Lightroom & almost decided to use it as my default RAW image processors.
Unlike Adobe imaging products which are at best free to try but very costly otherwise if you decide to pursue with them, Hasselbad Phocus is completely free. Generally they expect that Phocus users would also be Hasselblad product users but there is no constraint from the company to prevent anyone from using it otherwise.
As of now I have tried all the basic Nikon NEF RAW file edits in Phocus and have been very happy with the results. It is simple to use and does all the functions I use in Lightroom. But there are several technical things that I do not know yet.
Some of the key improvements in Lightroom’s latest versions have been the way the software uses memory and how their image edits are non-destructive. The software is really fast and even tough I use it on a basic 2009 Macbook Pro laptop, I have never had any issues with speed. My major difficulty has been with the immensely large catalog that I have created (entirely my ignorance).
In my use I found that Hasselblad Phocus does a very good job in exposure enhancements & it recovered +9 to +10 exposure latitudes very nicely. Features like Recovery, Shadow and Clarity tools have been enhanced to ensure that each capture’s full dynamic range is available to photographers. A detail slider is also available to manage local contrast when using the Clarity tool.
I am yet to try this RAW editor on a new Catalog and try some of the more complex tasks and multiple tasks that use up a lot of memory (like Export functions) and see how the software performs. So if you are using Lightroom and possibly making some light use of Adobe Photoshop, you should give Hasselblad Phocus a try.