If I’m going to be happy with PhotoLab, at least in the short term, I will need to find a front-end application that can offer metadata presets. Photo Mechanic seems like overkill and other programs I’ve looked into off photo editing, which is extra baggage.
What application do you use, or would you suggest?
You didn’t ask me but i use this its free if you have a account by adobe.
I am dabbling with that now. It looks as if PhotoLab won’t notice the changes to metadata until I tell it to read metadata from the file. This is even though I have the preference to keep XMP data synced on.
Perhaps it will work at least until DxO adds metadata presets to PhotoLab (I’m sure hoping in v7).
It updates when you select the image in the filmstrip of dxo.
I have often bridge and dxo open at the same time.
GPS from google is copy pastable in dxo but not in bridge. (type of writing i think.)
So that i manual push out.
Keywords i change in bridge.
IPTC i am changing in bridge because well bridge is in dutch wile dxo is in englisch.
It can be a surprise which field is filled in in bridge by dxo.
Colors and stars are from my culling app Fast Raw Viewer 2.0 which produces a xmp in adobe-style and those colortags are sins this year also supported by dxo.
So work flow is
Open folder in FRV, cull all bad one’s out. Give star-rating to usable images so i know which are first, second and last in row of keepers attention, use the collor tags as burst, bracket, groups tagging, so i know which are one of many almost the same or part of a sequence.(stacking)
Then tag and template iptc add some info if needed in the fields.
Open dxo find the new folder
Start editing with help from the by FRV color and stars filled in info.
If i make a virtual copy other then a tryout of something (which i often delete when done.) i use bridge iptc field editor to write in the why and how for vc1,2,3,… So i understand the reason of the vc’s later.
Exporting a tiff for NIC’s (old free version) i let it return in the same folder and give t a suffix from where it came. And add the filternames in the xmp or propertie section.
This way i keep a steady dam structure.
If dxo dam would be as bridge is evolved i can cut out step bridge.
Thanks. I’ll give that a try.
I use Lightroom Classic — which you can do for free if you only use the Library module.
That is exactly the idea I stumbled upon trying to figure a way around not having metadata presets in PhotoLab! I’ll try that for a while and maybe we’ll see those prests in v7.
Denoise is done at the same time as demosaicing in the processing pipeline, that is at the very beginning. So all the editing you do, including the unsharp mask, is applied after that.
Perfect answer to this question!
I would now add this to my previous answer. With PL9 released in sept '25, DXO added an option to alter the denoising settings in the masking section, and the unsharp mask is also available there. It is then now perfectly possible to push denoise and lower sharpening in some areas, while increasing detail (a denoise option) and sharpening in others. For exemple in wildlife sometimes people want more details in the bird and smother noise free backgrounds, So with PL9 more flexibility was introduced.
The Unsharp mask is not available in Local Adjustments. I think you are confusing it with local Lens Sharpness Optimization which is a completely different tool based on the availability of a lens profile.
Mark
Hi Mark. No I don’t confuse with lens sharpness. Go to the bottom of the sliders in the Local Adjustments section, the last two are Sharpness and Blur. They are the same tools as in the global adjustments except with fewer options for tuning them. These two were there in PL8.
The sharpness and blur tools in local adjustments are not the same thing as an unsharp mask which you indicated is in local adjustments. The Unsharp mask in PhotoLab is only available globally. I’m not sure why we’re having a disconnect on this.
Mark
PL9 has both ‘Lens Sharpness Optimization’ and ‘Sharpness’ in Local Adjustments palette. The latter is clearly similar to the global ‘Unsharp Mask’, i.e. produces visible halos at higher intensities, much larger than Microcontrast, not to mention LSO.
Negative Sharpness values look more subtle than negative Microcontrast, while Blur is very aggresive even at low values.
Despite the creation of halos from over sharpening, the sharpness tool in local adjustments does not have the functionality of traditional unsharp masks.
Mark
I think LA Sharpness is based on Unsharp Mask with preset Radius, Threshold, Edge Offset. Probably DxO didn’t want to clutter the LA palette, so made a compact version. LA LSO is also simpler than the global version.
You think they are different and I think they are the same edge detection based contrast. Except in the local adjustments the sliders that relate to controlling where contrast is applied, the masking part in a way in the name Unsharp Mask, are not available. However in the Local Adjustment you are working with normal masks to start with so a selection of where you sharpen is done that way. So anyhow for me they are the same tool. If you want to sharpen a bird but not the branch, you go easy on the global sharpening or even turn it down, and then create a local adjustment mask and apply sharpening to the bird using that sharpening option.
Because it is in the local adjustments and you use those masking functions instead of the “traditional ones”. The actual sharpening is the same i.e. local contrast applied to the edges.
Are you sure?
The threshold masking in the unsharpened mask seems very different than the mask in Local adjustments.
This Cambridge in Colour article explains the unsharp mask.
https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/image-sharpening.htm
The DxO LA mask defines the area of the photo to be affected - the bird in your example. The area under this LA mask can include areas with very gradual contrast (a sun shadow for example) to areas of very strong contrast (the feather edge details or the actual edge of the bird against the sky).
The mask/threshold in USM looks is not looking at the overall area enclosed in the LA selection mask. Rather, the USM threshold reduces or blocks the sharpening effect for the more gentle contrast changes. When the threshold value is increased this blocking effect is applied to increasingly sharper and sharper contrast edges.
Perhaps you are thinking of the High-pass filter method of sharpening, often used with area masking to target specific areas in a photo. This tool generally uses a single value (radius), representing the sharpness of the edge contrast, to define which edges are sharpened. The higher the “radius” the more gradual sharpness edges are affected. Sort of the opposite of the USM threshold. The strength of this effect is then controlled by the opacity of the effect, or in PS, the type of layer mask applied (hard light, soft light, luminosity, etc).
The traditional approach I learned was to use USM globally for “capture sharpening”, then consider HPF sharpening for local “creative” sharpening". Since these two tools are different, and are placed in different "palettes’, my guess is that DxO is considering them in this way.