See attached snap
EDIT, PREFERENCES, RAW OPTIONS
Fred

Now one more step.
With all your selected settings in place, Click SAVE in that BOx Qimage will name the SAVE according the the selected thumbnail to the camera you used.
From then on, anytime you open your images from that camera, the saved setup will be used.

By the way, it's your choice, but you dont get much sharpening action when the slider is all the way to the right. Look at my snap that I sent as a sample.

Sorry I took so long to post something.

I got involved in something else.

If you look carefully at the detail in the q rendition, you will see more detail in areas where ACR smeared over it in an effort to get rid of the Chroma noise.
May be hard to see in these low resolution snaps.

Terry will probably have his version of how he likes it.
PS Just click on both snaps so they enlarge, and look at the teeth in the skeleton face on the B&W hanging poster

Fred

I have moved my Thumbs and RawCache to the C:\ProgramData\ddisoftware\Qimage folder which is on the SSD. I really can't see a significant difference in speed. I have noticed that Qimage has put a bunch of large 16 GB JPEG files in the RawCache. That seems like very large files just to display an image on a monitor screen. Just about everything I do in the Edit screen seems to bring up the spinning blue wheel, and I am spending an awful lot of time watching the wheel spin! In the Edit screen do you have to click on Apply for each tab, or just once before you quit the Edit? Good 4-5 second wait every time I touch that button. And to finally output a JPEG is probably almost twice as long. I run Windows 8.1 x64. Is Qimage running in 64 bit or 32 bit? It does not seem to be using much memory, so I am thinking 32 bit?

On the color bit depth in the Editor if it is using 8 bit color space, then stretching the histogram with Levels and making other significant color adjustments is likely to cause posterization?

Oops, another brain fart on the Cache JPEG's. Should be MB of course. But, still I don't understand the need to have such large files. It only takes 2000 pixels of width to fill my screen.

I will try the OK button on the Preview box and see how that works.

On the noise, yes there certainly was a lot of noise in that "Day of the Dead" restaurant picture as it was taken in low light. However, I would suggest the beach shot which was taken in full daylight has very little noise. In Adobe Camera RAW I just left the settings at default which is zero Luminance NR, and 25 for Color. Just checked it and I could have backed the Color off to 15, but unless it is a low light shot, I just leave NR at default. My observation is that this image has very low native noise. I am not sure where that noise in the sky is coming from in the Qimage image. It seems to be creating it? Or perhaps it is aggressive sharpening. But, I turned off sharpening for the sky tone.

In the ACR workflow NR and Sharpening is left to the end, which makes sense. However, in Qimage Ultimate it seems to me that one should do the RAW Refine first, which is where the auto NR and Sharpening are located. It doesn't seem to make sense to do RAW Refine last if you want to use the Editor just to "touch up" the adjustments to take care of what was not done automatically.

I don't see posterization in the Qimage edit, but I sure do see noise. As for processing time, I am experienced with ACR and it probably takes me a minute to do this type of image. I don't see Qimage taking less time, and currently takes much more, unless you accept the auto development.

I'm still not able to get the quality of the Qimage image up to that of ACR and Capture One Pro 7. Even your images that you posted look grainy and dirty to me.

I think we are talking past each other.

I've given you two images from my RX100. One was a very noisy available light shot, and I was very disappointed in how Qimage RAW Refine handled it with default settings. It INCREASED noise instead of reducing it and frankly it made the image unusable. In my view the ACR version of it was usable, but not great. It by necessity had large amounts of noise reduction applied and yes that does smear detail. However, in my view with the appropriate tradeoffs made it still can work, and did.

I also gave you a second RX100 image of a beach. That image does not have any significant noise. I used essentially zero noise reduction in ACR. It is not possible that ACR smeared the image. But, on the other hand, using default Noise Reduction settings in Qimage Ultimate, it somehow managed to introduce noise into the image. I would like to learn how Qimage is doing that, so I can avoid it.

I also processed the same image with Capture One Pro 7, and applied no noise reduction. It also like the ACR version shows a nice clean sky with no noise, and again it is not possible to have smearing because no noise reduction was used. See a low res version of it below.

I would like to thank everyone who participated in the discussion for all the suggestions. I certainly know a lot more now about the ability of Qimage Ultimate when it comes to RAW development and image editing. I think I have satisfied my curiosity  on how it works, and whether or not it could be a one stop solution for my development, editing, and printing of images. At least for now, I have concluded that for RAW development and image editing, Qimage Ultimate is not a good fit for my camera and my tastes in image editing. However for printing, I still feel it is unmatched and I will continue to be a satisfied user. Still not fully settled, but it is looking like my workflow is going to be Capture One Pro 7 for RAW development, and initial editing to the extent it can be done in that software. Further pixel editing using layers, filters, etc. will be done in Photoshop Elements Editor, and then final printing in Qimage Ultimate.