Mark,
Hello all, I'm pumped to have been tipped off about photo mechanic... it has allowed me to put off buying a new computer for a while (the rendering time on lightroom was beginning to kill me)
I primarily (second shoot) weddings which involves selecting (and depending who I shoot for editing) between 100-300 out of the 1700 photos I shoot.
I also shoot horse shows, and my only money comes from print sales. The first time I shot the event I edited all of the pictures I uploaded and only sold one. (not worth my time), but if I could still shoot in RAW and then use photomechanic to make full size jpegs to put on my smugmug account for sale I would be pleased.
The question is is it possible to produce full size jpegs from RAW files with photo mechanic without going to lightroom or photoshop?
The answer is going to depend on two factors:
1) Does your camera embed full-size JPEG previews into the RAW files that it produces (or can it be set in its settings to do so)?
2) Are you always going to be happy with the quality (color, toning, sharpness, etc.) of the embedded JPEG?
If the answer to both of those questions is 'yes' then you can use the Save as function to produce your JPEG output, or if you don't want the JPEG data to be manipulated at all then you can use the 'Extract JPEG Previews from RAW photos...' command on the Tools menu to pull out the embedded JPEG with no processing whatsoever.
-Kirk
