It’s incredible that it still competes (and outperforms) most of the alternatives. Lightroom CC review (2020) Lightroom Classic review; DxO PhotoLab vs Lightroom vs Capture One – which is best for RAW files? It also knows their weaknesses. In my testing, more noise was removed and more detail was preserved than I could achieve in Lightroom's noise reducer or with Capture One Pro. Each time you open a folder containing images, the program detects the camera and lens used for the photos therein, and it prompts you to download a module for the combination so that PhotoLab can optimize the image based on the equipment used. There are eight basic colors, and you can change the selected range on the color wheel. When you make a purchase you establish an account, and then you can download, install, and activate whenever you wish to do so. Luminar 2018 Update – the Sky’s the Limit? More on that topic later. Clicking on an entry takes you to the mask in the image. The profiles include DSLR camera body and lens combinations as well as smartphone cameras. By Stan Sholik . The last tool, Control Point, applies the correction to all pixels in the selected area of the same color and brightness value as the point. You can also alter HSL using local edits, but you have to use standard sliders. PhotoLab has made some progress in the organization department, though it still falls far short of Lightroom Classic in this aspect. by PhotoJoseph | Oct 23, 2019 | Featured, Tips & Techniques. I may still use the black Friday half-price deal to upgrade to elite, but otherwise, I’m not sure 3 is a significant step up from 2 and I’ve been reassured by your conclusion. And the horizon-leveling tool does the job, though not automatically the way Lightroom does. The right-hand panel contains all the image adjustments on offer: I have already described much of what DXO can do in my previous review. Let’s see. I do wish that it had an eyedropper tool for selecting a color range on your image, but you can do some nifty color replacements nevertheless, and you can use the tools mentioned in the previous section for that. Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine's lead analyst for software and web applications. We looked at the already impressive standard Noise Reduction tool compared to the new PRIME denoise tool. It would make more sense to me to have keywords and metadata as a panel in PhotoLibrary view, rather than in Customize, which is mostly about image correction. The feature saves you from having to create masks for different areas of an image to adjust them independently. Discover all the new features of the latest DxO Photolab version. Most noise correction just compares nearby pixels to determine which represent noise, but DxO examines a much larger area to make this determination, which should remove more noise while leaving more detail. It’s on a Black Friday sale for £72. But DXO can do it for virtually every camera and every lens. DxO PhotoLab 3: The most colourful upgrade yet. PhotoLab does camera and lens-profile based geometry correction for barrel, fisheye, and pincushion distortion automatically, also letting you fine-tune. The Brush tool is clearly accessible from the big Local adjustments button at the top of the Customize mode. I’m not just talking about distortion, vignetting or chromatic aberrations. It's even possible to combine any of these in a search. Capture One, in its last update, made a big push with layers in its latest version, letting you see, for example, a mask layer. When enabled, you can change colors without having to select them. The change they have made is to provide a panel, much like a layers panel, to let you select each set of adjustments more easily. DxO PhotoLab 3 has just launched, and with it come some very exciting new features — the most colorful one being the new HSL (Hue / Saturation / Luminance) tool! It just makes local adjustments a little easier to use. Once you hit Export for a photo for which you selected Prime noise reduction, you see an icon in the photo's thumbnail that it's being processed, and a tiny progress bar that you can click to enlarge and view a countdown timer. You can choose a grid size for multiple images, apply sharpening, and add a caption in the font style of your choice. DXO are no exception and I’ve been playing with their new release of DXO Photo Lab 3. Before that he worked on PC Magazine's Solutions section, which covered programming techniques as well as tips on using popular office software. DXO Photo Lab needs Windows 8.1 or 10 64 bit. ... Photo Software Reviews October 25, 2019 AndyBell. This means you can shoot in low light or at higher ISO and still retain sharpness and detail. It’s coming, but Windows users will have to wait for it. Below, you can see how to apply a DCP color profile to your image. Excellent autocorrection based on camera and lens characteristics. The DxO PhotoLab is the successor to their OpticsPro 11. Nikon Nikkor Z 50mm F1.8 S lens review 44 lens. DXO have analysed your lens (assuming they support your camera and lens. DxO PhotoLab's red-eye tool works completely automatically, and nearly perfectly if the red areas are clearly delineated and the faces not obscured. New in Version 3 is a mask panel under Local Adjustments that shows you previously applied local adjustment masks. The DxO tools offer fun and powerful ways to alter images, for example intensifying a sky or changing a shirt's color. The big change came when DxO … Topaz Gigapixel AI Vs Canon EF x2 Extender, Is this the End for Photo Software Companies? Both offer class leading quality. New HSL tool, up to 40 one click presets, U Point technology and many more Other tools, such as Exposure X5 and Lightroom are more mature in this area. DXO say Photo Lab 3 has enhanced capabilities here. You do get star ratings, and even pick and Reject tools for organizing your photos. Absolutely! The tool can bring a face out of obscurity in cases where there's a bright background. Print. One online sharing capability that's lacking is via email: Lightroom Classic lets you quickly send out any image onscreen via a right-click. PhotoLab 3 continues DxO's … The spot-metering and auto-microcontrast tools benefit both portrait and landscape photographers. No, I mean lens sharpness. Once you've perfected your image in PhotoLab, the blue bar at bottom-right lets you output directly to disk, to another photo editor, to Facebook (though only on macOS), to Flickr, or to Lightroom Classic. The program makes good use of keyboard shortcuts, like Ctrl-J for creating a virtual copy of your photo. DXO has been my equal favourite piece of photo software for some time now. Elite is good because of the ClearView and Prime Noise reduction. Lightroom lets you get about the same result with some tweaking, and DxO's tool doesn't find faces in profile. A magic wand button automatically sets the microcontrast for the current image. Check here to see if yours is). Adding Keywords to the Digital Asset Management is welcome, or will be when the Windows version gets it. With DXO I can paint over with the healing brush and it should vanish…. For DxO veterans, below is a cheat sheet of what's new for the latest version update: The dark gray interface of PhotoLab has a clean, subdued look. The last can even add bokeh iris circles if you crank it up enough. In addition to the standard exposure slider, you can use DxO's Smart Lighting slider, which can brighten shadowy areas without punching out whites. Searching for an image by the camera, lens, aperture etc, is not that useful. They are just enhancements. Another MIA option is a history panel, which would let you undo back to a particular edit. Easy. The latter is where you do all your editing and tuning. It also now has two modes: Clone and Repair. PhotoLab is available for Windows 7 SP1 and later, and for macOS 11.11 and later. April 16, 2018. I have been using the Elite edition for this review. Note: The Windows version doesn’t get this update yet. The display of third-party trademarks and trade names on this site does not necessarily indicate any affiliation or the endorsement of PCMag. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time. PhotoLab is a PCMag Editors' Choice award for high-end photo editing. DxO, one of the most innovative companies in the field of photography and image editing, is unveiling DxO PhotoLab 4, a major update of its multiple award-winning photo-editing software.. On a more basic level, I wish all photo editing programs would simply use the standard Windows share feature, which would ease exporting and sharing in general. It lets you adjust the effect area with a line you can grab, extend, or rotate with the mouse cursor. PCMag.com is a leading authority on technology, delivering Labs-based, independent reviews of the latest products and services. When exporting to disk, you can choose multiple outputs at once. The Photo Library is where you perform DAM operations and view your images. With the recent addition of Nik Software’s U Point capabilities, PhotoLab enabled detailed, controlled, small area modifications to images. Pingback: Is this the End for Photo Software Companies? Under the standard Contrast slider, the Microcontrast tool can add serious sharpness to images without adding the typical distorted edges sharpening can cause. Speaking of Adobe's app, at installation, you can choose to include installing the DxO software as a plug-in for Lightroom Classic. Cranking this all the way up creates a decent single-shot HDR effect, but for more drastic HDR effects, check out CyberLink PhotoDirector. It's key because the software automatically applies the fixes as soon as you load a photo. DXO knows exactly how much softer your images are in the corners and on the edges and it selectively sharpens each image to correct this. In contrast Affinity Photo’s Inpainting Brush had no problems: DXO Photo Lab is one of the two RAW editors I use regularly. Thanks for the quick reply. Most of the time… Sometimes DXO does better, particularly in challenging light. To get a couple of DxO PhotoLab's coolest features, such as Prime de-noising and ClearView, you need the Elite version, which is what I tested for this review. When you first run the program, a popup tells you that it would be a good idea to download modules that support raw files shot with your equipment, based on photos it finds in your Photos directory. - Andy Bell Photography, Upgrading to Windows 10 - Andy Bell Photography, Skylum Luminar 4 - First Looks - Andy Bell Photography, Adobe Alternatives-Photo Software for 2019/2020 - Andy Bell Photography, DXO NIK Collection V3 - Overview & Review - Andy Bell Photography, DXO Photo Lab 4 - The Return of the King? Since I got it (yes, I paid for my own copy) I’ve not used any other RAW converter… I still finish my images using Topaz Labs software, though…. Exposure X6 review. It’s not as sophisticated. Thank you for this review. I also like how the mouse wheel zooms you in and out without requiring you to use a key combo. Comments. In fact, the tool boasts some cutting-edge features to make ... Read moreDxO Photolab The installer weighs in at 455MB, which isn't outrageous when you consider that Lightroom Classic($9.99/Month at Adobe) is pushing 2GB. DxO PhotoLab automatically reads the data in the image and applies adjustments on import, including corrections based on the lens and camera used, what the … It now features DAM (Digital Asset Management). No long waits for imports, building previews, etc. Here's another example, with DxO on the left and Lightroom on the right; it shows the Adobe Dehaze tool applying a strong blue color cast, while DxO ClearView Plus leaves the colors more natural. DxO PhotoLab 2.2 Software Review DxO PhotoLab 2.2 is the latest version of the popular photo editing software so we thought we'd see what's new and how it's improved the software. DXO is more than a RAW converter. And, most importantly, it knows how to fix them. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. And the PRIME noise reduction is phenomenal. Sign up for What's New Now to get our top stories delivered to your inbox every morning. It works the way spot metering in a camera works, but lets you apply it after the shot. As with all similar tools, Repair only works if there's a consistent texture around the object you want to remove. The only way to apply Prime to the whole image is to export it, which can take over a minute. Speaking of sharpness, DxO's Lens Sharpness tool impresses. It even pulls in your previously used tags and albums and offers them as selections. If the auto correction doesn't quite hit the mark, the program's Customize mode lets you change exposure compensation, contrast, colors, detail, and more. Maybe Canon’s DPP software can do this using its Smart Lens analysis. jch2103 (jch2103) August 7, 2019, 5:42pm #10 And it’s pretty good at what it claims. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Third-party utilities like those from X-Rite let you create your own profiles with a color target board. You can easily visualise the changes you are about to make. I knew that I would not change my opinion on reviewing the new release. Preset choices include Slight, Medium, and Strong; choose Custom to adjust the slider to taste. Photo software companies offer upgrades around this time of year. Which is a pity. The Equalizer control has sliders for adjusting Exposure, Contrast, Microcontrast, Clearview (see next section), Vibrancy, Saturation, Temperature, Tint, Sharpness, and Blur. It displays the thumbnails quickly, no fussing about with imports. So DxO PhotoLab tends to get more favorable ⭐ reviews than Affinity BW Creative Photo, as seen on the chart below. Use them wisely and consistently and you’ll never lose an image again. Various viewing options are on offer at the top of the screen. Share. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Its Feathering, Flow, and Opacity sliders let you control the transition from the effect to the unaffected areas, as well as, obviously, the effect's transparency. Announced as part of a trio of lenses for Nikon’s … November 2, 2020. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine's coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. So Adobe Photoshop Elements 2019 tends to get more favorable ⭐ reviews than DxO PhotoLab, as seen on the chart below. DxO has added powerful new location correction tools and changed its name to show the full range of software enhancements and various functions – DxO PhotoLab. Whether dust or an unwanted element in the scene, sometimes you need to repair an image. Focus Stacking with Serif Affinity Photo. The result is stunning. When you go to add a keyword to another photo, recently used ones are available, but there are no preset keyword sets, and you can't create your own sets, as you can in Lightroom Classic. 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