I mentioned in an earlier post that I was using DxO now. I was introduced to the product in November at the Digital Summit workshop in Zion National Park. It looked pretty interesting and besides I got a deal I couldn’t refuse. I waited for the release of DxO Optics Pro 5 before jumping in. There were a lot of improvements made to version 5 that corrected some of the more serious shortcomings of version 4.
First of all, DxO works with RAW images. And given the sorts of corrections it applies, it makes sense to use DxO before any other RAW converter like LR, ACR or Capture One. So that’s where it comes in my workflow. Actually, I generally import RAW images into LR first, review and rank them in LR. When I determine the images I want to work on I then bring them into DxO and work on them there before returning to LR.
I really like the way DxO will remove the distortions caused by your particular camera / lens combination. It’s very remarkable in this way. It reads your EXIF file to determine camera, lens, focal length and exposure and makes adjustments to your RAW image to correct for the inevitable distortions that occur with any gear you might choose.
I’ve noticed that it does some admirable and sometimes remarkable highlight and shadow recovery, especially the latter. With some slightly underexposed images the shadows just open up. It also makes an attempt at highlight recovery but clipped highlights are clipped highlights and nothing can get them back. What it appears to be doing with highlight recovery is pull the histogram down but there’s still no detail.
There are lots of other controls you might choose to adjust exposure, color, geometry and detail. I won’t go into them all here, at least not at this time. Suffice it to say I mainly use light and color.
The user interface is still very awkward. Well, first, it takes forever to load. The splash pannel comes up, goes away and then an extraordinary amount of time goes by where absolutely nothing happens. It’s so long you may be tempted to launch the program again, figuring something has gone wrong. But if you’re patient it eventually comes up.
Before you can work on an image you have to add it to a project. It’s a step that no other image processing software requires and feels very awkward. It doesn’t keep your adjustments in metadata like LR but actually creates a new file at the end of the process. Maybe that’s why you need to add the images to a project but I’m not really sure and am puzzled by this step.
The color management from image to screen seems to be imprecise. I may work on an image in DxO thinking the color looks pretty good only to be surprised (and sometimes a bit aghast) when I see the images again in LR. It’s not something that can’t be corrected in LR or PS but it is a surprise.
These are all things that can easily be worked with, however, and do not detract from the incredible job DxO does with correcting camera and lens distortions.
One thing that is really annoying, however, is how DxO becomes totally non-intuitive at times. When working on an image in the Prepare step I wanted to switch to another image. I clicked on the other image but it would not come up in the working area. The original image remained. Nothing I tried could get the new image to be displayed. Finally I exited DxO entirely, relaunched it and then was able to work on the image I wanted. This is very, very strange and frustrating, but not frustrating enough to give up its prime functionality.
My conclusion is that DxO is a terrific tool that I will religiously use from now on. I’ll continue to explore some of it’s other functions and report on what works and what doesn’t. But from now on, every image I get serious about will pass through DxO first.
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