Would differences in RAW developers help the situation of Ko Fe specifically in attaining a look with more pop upon importing the files?
I understand that RAW is there for malleability in post but for the goal of "the least PP as possible" objective, would exploring different developers help?
All raw conversion processing apps have defaults based on what their creators felt posed as priorities in image rendering. These defaults are without a doubt somewhat different from one app to the next. So yes: One might find that for some class of images one raw conversion app does a more pleasing job than another, and for another class of images the reverse might be true, and there might be others handled better by yet a third, and others by yet a fourth
all operating at their defaults. And so forth...
BUT ... Is it really sensible to have to acquire, install, learn, and maintain several different raw processing apps when
any one of them is certainly capable of being used to produce very nearly the same results that
all of them do on their defaults? I'm sorry, but it is just foolishness to do that. It is FAR more efficient and better time spent to simply learn how to look at any given raw file that the defaults of a particular raw processor does handle well and learn how to obtain that kind of rendering from the ones that it doesn't handle well on its defaults.
The statement that
"any digital processing is removing part of original image" is simply incorrect. The process of rendering an image is indeed always a lossy process in the technical sense of "data will be reduced by these manipulations" ... but the goal of rendering is to expose and bring up the parts of a captured image that you want viewers to see while pushing down and reprioritizing whatever parts of a captured image the occlude the important parts. In essence, the process of rendering an image is the process of exposing what you want to show. This is the same whether you work with film, enlarger, and chemical processes or with digital capture and image processing. BOTH require a good deal of learning to figure out both what to do and how to do it correctly. A raw digital capture isn't even viewable without rendering to RGB one way or another, in the same way that a negative isn't directly viewable as a finished image without additional work being done, and that rendering process is
always lossy—the notion is that you throw away the things that are irrelevant and expose the things that are relevant with that lossy process.
And if you say, "Well, the JPEGs out of the camera are nearly perfect, why aren't the raw images?" just be aware that the JPEGs out of the camera are raw captures that have been subjected to raw conversion and then adjustment algorithms ... and then compressed for efficiency in storage and transmission. The actual amount of data being presented in those "perfect" images has been reduced from the raw capture data total by typically 60% to 80%; they are perfect specifically when the settings of the rendering engine match the capture data conditions well.
These are the hard facts of making photographs: you have lots of techniques to learn both in capture and in rendering what you've captured to the final photograph. It's NOT a simple thing, it only seems simple when you rely upon automated/external processes that you don't have control over to do the work for you, presuming that they do a passable job. They often do not, which is why being able to save digital captures as raw files is valuable. Raw files out of a camera have vastly more data in them than JPEG files do, which enables you to edit and render the raw files to a finish state with far more precision and quality. It takes some work and knowledge to do that.
If you're not willing to learn how to do this, then all bets are off that you will consistently get what you think you want. If Ko.Fe is working with raw files and Lightroom, all he has to do is spend some time learning how to use Lightroom and he would find that he can very quickly and with minimal effort make all the adjustments he needs on an arbitrarily large number of files
at the same time bringing the total PP work to virtually zero per photograph.
It is very, very, very rare that I spend more than about twenty to thirty seconds rendering even my most difficult photographs. I might spend a half hour or more looking at an exposure to decide how I want it to look, but the actual adjustment time required is rarely more than just a moment. Part of this is that I've learned how, for each and every one of my cameras, to get the exposure that I want such that the defaults of my chosen raw processing app do a good job. And the other part is that I've learned how to see my exposures from the perspective of the raw processing app with respect to where the defaults fail and my desires prefer, and I've learned how to push the settings to the point where the rendering of those exposures suits what I want.
G
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." – Albert Einstein
