Definitely can alter hue, saturation, exposure, contrast. Noise appears quickly even with slight changes...changes that produce negligible or no noise in photoshop back at the office. Useless for me as a RAW editor on the road because after setting the exposure, etc, then other apps are required to crop and sharpen. If the image is too far gone to process on the road with a JPG editor then PhotoRAW is no better, and is slower too.
Frisky650 about PhotoRaw, v3.6.4