I was not referring to anyone’s spending decisions.
Mark
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For many years now, I’ve seen exciting upgrades that made me feel “I want that”… although at times, I rarely need all the power of PhotoLab.
I can’t see any point in upgrading, for me. PhotoMechanic + PhotoLab is all that I need, and to be truthful, much more than I need.
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It’s always a personal decision whether any upgrade meets your own “value” proposition.
This year DXO have concentrated on, what was an inevitable, completion of the Local Adjustment UI, and it is now not only in-line with the competition, and enhanced with HSL, but can now be further expanded, by for example adding curves to LA. They have also added some relatively niche features like Colour calibration charts, new colour presets, LUTs etc.
Most people using PL6 and not interested in the niche features may be less wowed by this new version but hopefully DXO have put in the infrastructure to enable more important image editing capabilities to be developed for V8.
The advantage of a perpetual licence is that PL6 continues to work and costs you nothing, it’s a win-win.
Version 8 will hopefully, depending on which features DXO decide to target, will make you "want V8, 
Market forces are hopefully going to focus DXO’s development time on improved masking to become competitive with ON1 Photo Raw, Capture One etc. I say hopefully as DXO will do their own thing but once you have used AI maskingand better masking tools for a while you don’t want to go back. Just imagine Control Points/Lines with edge detection and extra refine and feather tools? I am keeping my fingers crossed.
Upgrading every 2 years was actually pretty normal back in the day, I think V8 will warrant a “Wow”
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Umm, the two year cycle PL5 to PL7 didn’t elicit a, “Wow”, from me, even though that step includes the DxO Wide Gamut colour space that was the fanfare feature of PL6.
I think you are forgetting DeepPRIME XD.
Mark
Oops, yes, I did forget that.
Still no ,“Wow”, from me though because for me, noise is not much of a problem.
The wide colour gamut did not affect my work, as my custom presets and Film Pack choices usually land me in legacy colour space anyway.
Improvements to local adjustments (effectively adding luminance masks by allowing us to fine tune chroma and luma selectivity) as well as the repair tools were very much worth it for v6. PhotoLab 6 was the first version where one could efficiently do the full pipeline of advanced development with bitmap corrections within PhotoLab. Almost no need for an external bitmap app as long as one’s crop didn’t require fill outside the initial frame (could be as simple as a bit of sky).
For me v6, ended up being a real wow.
From 6? Not for me at the price, given that I applaud the movement of local adjustment controls out of the on-screen image space. No other addition appeals.
Given that C1 23 has been on ‘black friday’ (or rather, week!) for £150 in uk money, and has the sweetest raw converter in terms of colour and tone, is very quick, and has pretty good AI masking - that’s my current favourite.
We all might have different accents of need, and noise reduction isn’t in the forefront of mine. Neither, and generally across PL versions, do I need prescriptive lens corrections, since none of my lenses will appear in the list. Indeed most distortions, vignetting, etc, are welcome and a sign of character - come on, let’s not try to sanitise the whole world! My main bugbear is chromatic aberration, and historically I found that even LR5 was better at manually getting rid of that, ad hoc.
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That is my greatest Wish since very long too. After turning/perspective correction a little bit filling of the edges!
A new licence, not upgrade, for C1 for £149 vs upgrade prices for PL7+FP7 (to get luma mask) at £134 or only a few cups of coffee less than C1, is an indication for how competitive the software market has become. For a lot of people sticking with PL6 and getting a new perpetual licence for C! might seem like an attractive proposition. The combination is compelling.
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Oh, a tip for fellow Europeans thinking about upgrading who also have income in USD (into Paypal in my case).
I suggest you go in via a VPN and purchase in USD. It will save you about 15% after one deducts the cost of currency conversion (you already have income in USD so spending some of it in USD saves converting it to Euros). $148 is €134 not counting the savings in currency conversion. It used to make sense paying in Euros when it was possible to reclaim the VAT (as a business).
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Reading about the new functions, I wasn’t sure if I’d go from 6 to 7 (PL and FP). Yesterday I decided that I should at least try before the sales are over. Even though I was initially annoyed about the discount not being as low as it had been previously I just upgraded both.
I also realised the issue with the price was more of a disappointment about not having saved as much as I thought I would. Also if I think of it in terms of bottles of wine over a year, it is really not much.
I did have another look at the other solutions, like I had when I decided I wanted more than Affinity + Freeware a year ago. All of the things offered, I could only seem myself using if I was in an advertising environment and needed to quickly edit images for online use or small print.
For me one of the main deciders was the colour calibration as my wife paints.
@uncoy Aside from questions arising from the fact of pretending to be located somewhere else to give DxO less money, does a purchase in this manner in any way affect how the buyer’s data is handled? I guess if terms preventing this have not yet been included in DxO shop’s T&C’s, then it probably will be soon.
Which aside from do you mean? Aside from
- DxO doubling renewal prices in two years
- DxO cheating EU business customers out of their VAT offset
- DxO moving to an annual update rather than an update when ready (used to be about every 1.5 or 2 years)
- DxO forcing their customers to double buy software (Nik 2 was force bundled with a second copy of PhotoLab which made no sense to those of us who already owned Elite)
- DxO deliberately moving core image correction functions (Fine Contrast, Luminance Mapping) from PhotoLab to FilmPack to force customers to buy additional software whose core functionality would otherwise not be of interest to many of us
- DxO changing the rules to force customers to upgrade within two versions or lose upgrade rights (happened to me already with Nik for which I paid for three DxO versions)
- DxO moving to support current macOS -1 instead of -2 (that cost me €3000 and turned my update cycle on our hardware upside down, only PhotoLab out of the software I use imposed these unwanted upgrades)
Which part of DxO’s gradually more and more exploitative treatment of their customers over the last few years would you like to highlight with that coy comment?
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When I look at their supported macOS it looks like it’s current +2 for their latest applications and current +3 for their previous releases.
It was -1 when PL5 was released. Mojave was dropped and Catalina was the minimum OS when the current OS was Big Sur.
a good summary of the most annoying DxO management decisions.
Add ignoring / not fixing long-known issues.
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Well, I´m not really interested in causing DXO financial problems. I have even upgraded to version 7 because I want them to survive and develop together with us. I will rather see them fixing these annoying problems with the Local Adjustments so we can work more efficient than with version 7 as is. Today I think many users think it is better to stay with version 6 instead and THAT is the really big problem for DXO.
They have delivered too little and with too many flaws and some of the features like LUT or Calibration features are just not targeting the majority of the users. That is why version 7 doesn´t attract the users enough to take the step to upgrade and that might be fine to jump a version for a few but if that is the majority of the users DXO is in deep mud.
I had a period when testing to migrate to Capture One but was put off because I couldn´t get it to sync metadata properly between Photo Mechanic and CO and also manage to open a set of images selected in PM Plus with CO. I have solved these problems properly now so the next upgrade I will do will decide and quite a lot speaks for Capture One I´m afraid. I will give DXO a maximum of two - three months and if nothing has happened before then I´m out. There are just so many more things available in CO.
If I migrate (and that is really swift and easy with CO) I will also be able to do all postprocessing tasks in one single software, instead of two.
It looks like even Camera Bits are changing the requirements for Photo Mechanic now for Mac.
"On macOS, Photo Mechanic Plus requires Mac OS X 10.10 or higher If you are using a Mac with macOS 10.9.5 or older, you will need to upgrade to macOS 10.10 or higher to use Photo Mechanic Plus.
NOTE: The system requirements will be changing soon to require macOS 10.15 (Catalina). This is because Apple has changed the notarization toolset and requires macOS 10.15. After October 31, 2023 we can no longer build new releases of Photo Mechanic Plus that support older versions of macOS.
On Windows, Photo Mechanic Plus requires a 64-bit edition of Windows 8 or higher. If you are using Windows 7, or lower, you will need to upgrade to Windows 8 or higher in order to use Photo Mechanic Plus.
Photo Mechanic Plus (R6890) 10/24/2023 "
Compatibility is not for ever. Last summer i found that my five year old Intel i5 computer was not compatible with Windows 11. Later it was anyhow destroyed by my movers when I changed flat but frankly, I´m glad that happened because my new i7 is just so much faster. Before it tool around half a minute to export an image from Photolab with Deep Prime XD and the new one takes 7-8 seconds. It matters when I process a few houndred images.
To cling to old gear is not always the right decision and even Mac users have many times testified that the M-architecture is really fast too compared to older gear.
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These are not decisions DxO should be making for its users.
PhotoLab on a 2009 Mac Pro 5,1 12 processor with Radeon VII was a smoother editing experience than on my M1 Max Studio. PhotoLab had the whole image in GPU memory and the sliders moved absolutely smoothly with immediate update.
Performance was just fine on my other 2009 Mac Pro 5,1 6 processor with Radeon RX580, but similar to the M1 Studio.
Sure but these problems got accentuated after implementing PictureLibrary because then even Photolab ended up in the same kind of compromise that Lightroom have had to cope with for decades. … and there is no way out of that if they don’t make the use of the local database optional but then a lot of the users would probably like me have to rely on PhotoMechanic or some other third party DAM-software that is more loosely coupled with Photolab than PictureLibrary is.
Well there is one way and that have been used in Lightroom the way Scott Kelby has written in his recommendations in several of his Lightroom bibles. From what I remember that recommendation was to never use full size 1:1 previews. Then scrolling was fast but the price still had to be paid as soon as you opened one image for editing.
It is the rendering of full size previews that kills the performance and nothing else really and sooner or later in the workflow of a converter with integrated image library that rendering has to take place when you develop images. The only way to escape that compromise is to use two separated application - one for culling and metadata jobs and one for image development - the first using just thumbnails that allows for really fast and efficient scrolling and the later using 1:1 images for jobs demanding full control of the tiniest details .
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