In the old days, optical perfection was much sought after by lens designers. These days, lens distortions can be “digitally adjusted away” by the in-camera JPEG engine or in post-processing. This has had a transformative effect on how manufacturers approach lens construction, as long as the lens is supported by the JPEG renderer. This is in fact, one of the reasons often cited for not opening proprietary mounts to third party vendors, since the original manufacturer is then expected to upgrade their JPEG engine firmware. So I think that it is important to know whether lens corrections are available, unless you are using older lenses built to more rigorous optical standards.
As one blogger notes: “If this trend continues, new lenses that produce the best possible image quality without correction may become harder to find, if they’re even available at all. The difference in distortion between the old Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L II USM and the new RF 35mm f/1.4L VCM is a good example. What if Canon decides to stick solely with the VCM series and its reliance on image correction?”
Please don’t open another can of worms, which is off topic.
The lens design has many faces: scientific, practical (e.g. design should be prone to production imprecissions), subjective (“feel”), economical. Too complex to discuss here. BTW, DNG is Adobe business-driven “standard”, which is yet another can of worms. The devil is in the details, as usual.
“THOUSANDS of photographers are mobile-only”. The image quality of mobile phones, impressive as it is, isn’t sufficient, in my humble opinion, to make it worth using DxO for anything other than the phone’s own JPG. I’ve tried getting extra detail out of DNGs, and the result was, to me, less satifactory than with using just the JPG.
ability to open and process recent DNG files from smartphone, even if in a limited scope
example : my iPhone makes pictures with excessive saturation and contrast, even in standard mode ; I can correct with saturation at 80%, but it is very time consuming by opening with Photos, customise setting, exporting to jpeg => picture by picture
panorama stitching ; almost all software are based on free libraries ; il is doable fo DxO
AI for eliminating some parts of the picture or completing missing information ; actual erasing is not smart at all and other software are doing a good job for years.
This is a small market compared to those using scanners to scan old photos to DNG. This is EVERY major and minor Museum, Art gallery, collection etc globally. Museums decided on DNG as their main archive format many years ago. Most of us use Vuscan software with a variety of scanners. This can produce DNG ready by almost everything except DxO and was a problem that was raised, repeatedly, before PL was born. There are Billions of scanned files in DNG format that can’t be read by PL All DxO has to do is to support the main scanner software packages used by the world’s museums eg Vuescan to start with. I stopped upgrading my PL at PL5 having been on what ever it was for many years before. Without full DNG support it is no use to me.
Everywhere you wrote DNG, you could swap it for HIEC / HIF too. everything from Pro cameras to phones uses it, yet PL for ever refuses to support it despite all the requests for it.
shocking statements ahead, purists should stop here
I don’t use noise reduction, EVER. in fact I often add “noise” aka grain in camera with higher ISO and specific “grain” settings. I don’t want it removed
I NEVER use lens geometry corrections. I use specific lenses for how they look and render an image which INCLUDES lens aberations. If I want clean, I use a new moderen lens stopped down a bit. when I more often want more look in the shot I’ll choose a lens for that, some of which are considerably more expensive than clean modern lenses. I dont need or want PL to remove what the lens has given me. EVER.
Why can’t the devs get this through their heads ? not everyone needs clinical lab grade scientific images. Sure its some folks like that look, but its not mine and its not a lot of people’s. Stop with the endless camera body + lens specific profiles that are repeated who knows how many times over. its silly and pointless nonesense. just profile a lens on the largest sensor you can, and you are done. its going to be all the same on every sensor that size or smaller, just adjust for sensor size and done… this would be so much faster, simpler, cheaper. just stop with this insane nonsense once and for all.
support the file formats we want, we are the paying customers sending PL our money, its not PL giving use the privilage of using their perfect app.
No primal scream therapy needed. So if I understand you correctly you don’t want or need noise reduction, geometry corrections or camera/ lens profiles. That is fine with me. You have your preferences and like what you like. No one can argue with that. Based on what you don’t want or need and the features that you do want and need, which are not supported, I wonder why you would ever consider purchasing PhotoLab. Clearly, it is not the software for you.
While better support for the DNG format and support of the HEIF format would be very desirable enhancements, most regular users here, myself included, seem to have no particular need for them. Your decision to avoid the use of noise reduction and geometry corrections and your lack of interest in lens profiles may work for you, but most of us here appear to find these features indispensable. There is no right or wrong about this, it is just a question of differences in personal preferences.
I hope you find software that helps you achieve you photographic goals since PhotoLab clearly doesn’t. However, based on your comments it would seem your preference may be for images straight out of the camera, which again is a personal preference.
C1 doesn’t support HEIF either, plus no more perm lic model that makes sense. I’m not going to fork out full price for an “upgrade” that dead ends w/o minor updates. They lost me as customer, and DXO is trying hard.
LR does support HEIF, but I’m not doing any subscriptions for all the well know reasons from cost to loosing your work once you don’t subscribe anymore.
When I bough DXO I thought it did support HEIF but the docs were vague. At this point it’s an old format. how can it not be supported given all the pro level cameras that shoot the format and it being 10bit.
So what is left that supports HEIF, RAF, has decent previewing & editing tools, perferably does film looks, has perm lic and sensible upgrade costs ? and has support for modern macOS/hardware. I’ll gladly jump at this point because I’m tired of workarounds for such basic format support. No I don’t need NR, lens corrections, geometry corrections. Panorama stitching would be nice, support for Timelapse sequences major bonus.
So why don’t you try out Affinity Photo which has HEIF support and DNG support? I am not sure it has everything you want but it seems to be a closer match for you than PhotoLab.
If you are serious about what you wrote, why don’t you stick with JPEG.
Nobody is pushing you to use a raw converter and stuff.
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stuck
(Canon, PL7+FP7+VP3 on Win 10 + GTX 1050ti)
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As suggested by @mwsilvers, check out Affinity Photo. I think you find it ticks all the boxes you’ve listed (though to get film looks you need NIK Collection, which work as plugins):
The free trial period is not very long so you might also want to ask questions on their forum, here:
Forum won’t let me post again for 24 hrs, so late response -
I do have the Affinity products and use them. they are fine but Photo is basically PS. It lacks a lot of basic viewing, organizing, copy and paste across multiple images, etc. that the PL, LR C1 apps do. You can’t view a folder of images. My organizing needs are also simple and folder based, I don’t really need an app to provide much more beyond viewing, deleting, move to sub folder, and then editing. That was one thing I liked is that PL didn’t try to over organize the work, it was happy to just open folders and show you what is there and provide tools for grading. Problem is it doesn’t see most of my images
yes I am 1000% serious about no NR or other lens corrections. yes I really do pic lenses based on how they render, rather than trying to correct every lens into clinical perfection of sameness to every other “corrected” lens. why bother with interesting lenses then ? some really expensive glass ( 4-5 figure range cinema glass ) is used because of its imperfections and more stylized render, not because its ‘perfect’. As example I have some 1.33X anamorphic lenses that I fight with for being too clean. a 1.25X 2nd anamorphic adapter on the front helps take the edge off, especially towards the edges. Always a fight with photo apps to handle anamorphic images.
Why not JPG ? because its 8bit and that doesn’t cut it for grading work or the usual time wasters of recovering hi-lights AKA sky enhancement or overall adjustments of tonality. JPG falls apart too easily. HEIC with 10bit and modest compression works as good as RAW most of the time with much smaller file sizes. In particular it’s really good for shooting Timelapse where you can make thousands of images in a day.
After some looking around maybe ON1 is what I’m looking for. Gonna try the trial unless some one has a better suggestion. Well trial works pretty well. tools are are bit limited and consumerish, but not bad. TL support needs native resolution option but for quick checks its ok… and $49 ?
Apparently DxO have chosen not to go down that road.
Perhaps because those entities are heavily invested in other archival solutions and DxO can’t see any roi in that area.
Or they simply do not have the resources to spare on the endeavour.
I have upgraded to every version of ON1 Photo Raw since 2018, but despite the many improvements over the years, I still rarely use it. I find it inferior to the PhotoLab suite in almost every way. However since you have tried several other software titles and are still unsatisfied, I hope that it meet your requirements.
As I’ve suggested earlier, clearly, PhotoLab is not the software to for you. It has a number of terrific features but many of the features it’s best known for you don’t use or need, and other features that you absolutely need may likely never be added. I have no idea whether you will ever find software which meets all your most important requirements and still gives you quality output, but perhaps that software exists.
Since there’s nothing else of value that I can add to this discussion that will help you with your dilemma I will be moving on to other topics. Best of luck.
Just from my quick trial tests, ON1 tools are not as good as PL / C1. They are more auto / consumer. The adjustment ranges seem a little limited. That said if I get 80% of the same results as PL / C1 with a fraction of time and effort, I can be ok with that most of the time. The AI selection tools are decent enough. It also come with a pile of preset looks that are decent, although many are over the top.
Perhaps its big advantage is to generate quick timelapse preview movs so its fast and easy to decide if a sequence is good or trash. despite all the right gear, setup, time and location, etc sometimes TL sequences just don’t work out and being able to sort that out quickly is very helpful compared to my current workflow with all the “pro” level tools that require lots of manual work to sort, move, process img sequences.
Without going into too many specifics, my quick take on ON1, after having owned all the upgrades since 2018, is that they add a large number of new features each year that look good at first blush but ultimately lack quality. The software, in my opinion, also suffers from significant software bloat, one example being all the filters for every type of situation which too often are just variations of the same subset of tools . PhotoLab’s smaller tool set can do most of what ON1 can do as well as other things that ON1 can’t do.
The big advantage to ON1 for some users is that they can find out how to do many tasks without becoming an expert while PhotoLab’s UI may require a steeper learning curve and more experience with it to accomplish similar tasks. However, once having gained an intimate familiarly with PhotoLab’s feature set, editing raw images using it is much, much faster than with ON1, and with greater quality. ON1 is very popular and many users love it so your experience may differ from mine.
As you said, ON1 is more of a consumer product rather than a professional level product, but if it is easier for you to use, meets you needs, and you are happy with the quality of the output, then it may be a good choice for you.
Thanks for posting the comparison. It probably says something about my skill as a photographer and a wielder of Photolab, but to me the differences between the two photos are a matter of user preference. You say that JPG is bad and the one from DNG is good. I’m not gainsaying you, but what are your criteria for good vs bad?
