The download and installation (re-installation) of DxO is complete. It took the better part of an afternoon however. The DxO technologies site is (in)famous for slow downloads. It literally took a couple of hours to download the 500 MB file. But it’s done, DxO is installed and I had a brief opportunity to use it.
I had forgotten what a delightful surprise it is when you first see your image previews as DxO prepares to do its magic. I just happened to choose come images from Alaska with our group (my daughter’s middle school class) in the foreground and a background of Mt. McKinley and the other peaks and glaciers of the Alaska Range. The foreground was under solid cloud cover while the background had scattered clouds meaning brilliant highlights on the clouds and snow. The lighting conditions were challenging indeed.
Now I can’t say that all the highlights were fully recovered but the resulting DNG file was a much better place to start from than the native RAW file. When I get a chance to work on the images more I’ll pass along what I discover.
One other observation is that it takes DxO a lot longer to process the 20+ MB files from my Canon 1Ds Mark III than it ever did with the 6 MB files from my trusty old 10D (go figure). And that’s with a 3 GHz CPU and 4 GB of memory. There’s an empty socket on my workstation motherboard that’s starting to call louder and louder to be filled with a second CPU. The time to give Dell sales a call is rapidly approaching. The question in the back of one’s mind is if the software is sophisticated enough to use the second CPU. There’s one way to find out. Stay tuned.
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