Downloaded a Fujifilm X-T2 with X-Trans RAW file, and tried it in PureRAW
Exported it to Lightroom
Fujifilm X-T2 with X-Trans is working !
The output was not impressive 
Yes, was in promo email ā¦ as received by those who downloaded the trial version.
John
OK, thank you. I will forward the info to the mktg department.
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On a whim I downloaded this after seeing the discussion pop up in my usual DxO Forum notification.
While being a PL4 Elite I see no use in my case.
But that is not why I am responding. After generating the .dng a took a look at its info. The color space that was assigned to it was the color space of my display, Display P3. I would think there should be an option to chose the color space of the export for .dmg and not default the the color space of the display.
FWIW, I did this on an M1 MacBook Air.
I noticed that the Finder tells us that an image is in P3 in case that the image has no assigned colour space. Look at the screenshot of the info regarding a .CR2 file of an image I shot in 2008 - and neither Canon nor Apple used P3 at that time.
Note the wording: Colour Space is RGB, Colour Profile is Display P3 and sRGB .JPG files display sRGB on the Colour Profile line.
Update after @Sigiās comment: Display P3 in the info dialog (screenshot above) simply means that the image is displayed with a P3 colour profile because the display has a P3 colour spaceā¦?
Iāve checked a .CR2 and its DPR output .DNG with exiftool -G -U -a name.ext
- .CR2 shows āAdobeRGBā in [MakerNotes] and āuncalibratedā in [EXIF]
- .DNG shows āAdobeRGBā in [MakerNotes] and has no colour space entry in [EXIF]
- Finder says āDisplay P3ā for both images.
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The raw data in the DNG does not have a colorspace but the embedded preview has. I assume that is what you see as Display P3
Turns out ON1 has some very nice tools but now that I have really had a play with it, they have a really strange take on some of the basics. As basic as zooming and panning. I may yet stick with PhotoLab.
But what was really interesting was working with a DeepPRIMEād image at full frame.
You have mentioned ON1 several times as a potential preference rather than continuing using PhotoLab. That is your choice of course, but I thought I would share my personal preferences and experience with ON1.
I own licenses for ON1 Photo Raw 2018, 2019, and 2020.but could never get satisfying results from my images that were anywhere close to what I could accomplish in Photolab.
ON1 is also bloated with tools that are mostly slightly different versions of one another. Once you understand how to use all the tools in PhotoLab, its smaller tool set can accomplish almost everything that can be done with that huge number of separate ON1 filters.
ON1ās overall performance was extremely poor compared to Photolab. I also hated the fact that you had to switch back and forth to different tabs to add local and global adjustments. I prefer Photolabās approach which allows you to make global and local adjustment edits interchangeably.
Worst of all, ON1ās raw conversions were mediocre, at best, when compared to Photolab.
When I first got my license for ON1 in 2018 I wanted to really like it, but at the end of the day I was really disappointed in it and rarely used it. After three years of hoping it would improve enough to satisfy my needs, I said enough is enough. I did not update to the 2021 version and have uninstalled the previous version from my system.
For me, the main benefit of owning three versions of ON1 was the greater appreciation it gave me for Photolab capabilities and output quality.
The only advantage I see to ON1 is that it may be easier to use for some people because of the myriad of preconfigured filters. What I think of as bloat may just be the kind of hand holding a lot of users need. And that may be very worthwhile to a large audience, but not to me.
Mark
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A lot of that resonates after spending only a few hours with it. I do think some of their ideas are good, but they are let down by poor execution. The RAW conversions were indeed mediocreā¦ which is why I fed it output from PureRAW. 
Iāve just been giving Luminar AI a bit of a go and I remember now what I liked about the original 2018 version I used. The interface is fast and simple (better than PL4 I reckon) but the performance wasnāt quite up to scratch with the AI stuff actually in play. It is fun to bang a few sliders about to get some interesting, punchy results, but Iām not sure I can get the nasty taste out of my mouth from their broken promises and penchant for abandoning software very quickly. I own a Luminar 3 license but it seems pretty broken on macOS Big Sur (export doesnāt work). I looked for upgrade pricing to Luminar 4 but thatās now end of life too! And because Luminar AI is āreally a new productā they donāt offer upgrade pricing at all and even bury the trial version.
Unlike years ago when the post processing landscape was primarily the very expensive PhotoShop, and the reasonably priced Photoshop Elements, today the choices seem almost endless with something for everyoneās requirements and tastes. After years of intensive testing of most of the available commercial and shareware offerings, I am the most satisfied with DXOās software products and own all of them except for PureRAW. Each of us needs to find the tool that they are most comfortable using and which gives them the most satisfying results. For me that is PhotoLab.
Mark
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Itās hard for me to applaud the introduction of new DXŠ software at a time when the development of their core software is progressing painfully slowly.
Letās face it, most of us are here for a PhotoLab. We participate in this forum with the idea to see noticeable progress and we are ready to pay every year for meaningful progress in the PhotoLab.
But again, I see DXO wasting the resource that is most scarce for other projects.
Yes, the market share of a photo lab is small. But it is small because it cannot attract enough professionals.
Professionals are the ones who do master classes, plein airs and seminars. And there they present the software they use. For the last 10 years, at none of the seminars I have attended has a DXO product been presented. If DXO wins the love of professionals, a larger market share will not be late.
Why professionals rarely use a PhotoLab? For all its merits, PhotoLab has one weakness. It has low performance. If you have to process a wedding, with a photo lab it will be the slowest. You will need 3 times more time and effort to do this job. You will probably do it a little better, but the customer will not see this.
By lower performance I do not mean the requirements for the computer configuration, but the time required for the photographer to process a session. Here, every extra click counts. Time is money.
In conclusion, please give us significant progress in PhotoLab 5. Donāt waste your time.
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Familiar with old PS, NIK Filter and LR5, I got ON1 2018 (without this bloated filter ā¦, even updated to 2019, 2020). It has some nice features (panorama/warp, supporting layers/masks, read/write psd ā¦), but supported only some of my āmodernā Nikon F-lenses. ā For this very reason I started my journey with DxO.
Wolfgang
My observations regarding Luminar AI and OnOne PhotoRAW:
I am currently trialing Luminar AI. I havenāt tried all of the tools and I havenāt tried it as a pure RAW converter, only as an enhancement program for previously converted DNGs and TIFFs. My impression is that most of the AI controls are designed to transform dull snapshots into(as someone else said) punchy, high contrast, highly saturated images suitable for posting on Instagram, Facebook and other social media, not for serious artistic photography. I have noticed that sometimes the effects of these tools look good over a portion of the photo but not globally over the entire photo. So far I have not found a way to apply these tools locally. It may exist, but I havenāt found it. There are no local adjustment or layers tabs that I can find, so you adjust the sliders and you take what the AI decides that your photo needs. Very nice for the photographer who wants punchy snapshots but does not want to spend very much time or effort editing their photos.
I have to admit that I am impressed with the sky-replacement feature. This is the raison dāetre for the software and manages to produce very pleasing results. The process seems to be a combination of masking and blending, rather than using a pure masking approach. The foreground is masked out but objects such as trees, lighthouses, poles, etc. are not tediously masked but rather blended into the new sky. You can see this if you look very closely(>300%) at these objects, but at normal viewing magnifications they are nearly seamless. Very impressive and it produces pleasing results. I donāt use sky replacement very often but there are cases where I think that it is appropriate. This is a nice program to use for this purpose.
Iāve been a dabbler with OnOne products since their Perfect Photo Suite 8. I thought that the height of their product development was PPS 9 where they had separate modules covering B&W, Portrait, Effects and Enhance, in addition to Browse. The Enhance module made no pretense of being a RAW converter. I thought that the B&W and Portrait modules were particularly complete and very good. They should have stopped here.
Calling OnOneās RAW conversion āmediocreā is being charitable in my opinion. Iām not a DAM user nor do I have any use for star ratings, ITPC data, or keywords. What I like about Photolab is the final output; period. The final product is IMO elegant, three dimensional, and very life-like. IMO the best final product on the market. OnOneās RAW conversion, by comparison is just laughable(or cry-able).
OnOne IMO is or is trying to be the Swiss Army Knife of editing apps. Their RAW conversions are mushy with unclear details and while their tones and colors are okay, they lack a certain panache. I do like their masking and layering structure but Affinity Photo works just as well and is easier to manage.
One thing that I can say for OnOne PhotoRAW is that it will do anything and everything you ever wanted. If you have something that you want to do to a photograph, chances are OnOne will do it. It may not do it very well but it will do it. In the end I think that OnOne is the jack of all photo-apps and the master of none.
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An excellent assessment Mark. Thatās pretty much my experience with these various products.
ON1 seems to have some potential, and perhaps a few years down the road It will be a more serious contender. As you point out, it has a lot of functionality that unfortunately is not that well executed.
As I indicated earlier it seems to have a lot of feature bloat which I believe is intended to make it easier for less experienced users to create some specific effect. The many filters seem to be a kind of preset with their own specific set of adjustment sliders. This feature bloat is probably one of the reasons performance is slow on so many computers.
When I said the ON1 raw conversions were mediocre, I was being generous. Iām sure many ON 1 users would very strongly disagree with my assessment and some of them may even post on this site. Over the last couple of years Iāve read many threads on a variety of websites where ON1 users extoll its virtues. However, I found that many of these ON1 users seem to have limited post-processing experience, even with ON1, and often also seem to have lower expectations of output quality than I do.
I am not that knowledgeable about the Luminar products, although I trialed version 4 briefly before it crashed and burned on my Windows machine. I think it does have some local adjustment and layer functionality, but Luminar crashed so often I never had the opportunity to fully investigate it. Overall, I agree with your assessment. Luminar does not make pictures look natural, IMHO. It makes them look over-saturated, punchy and exciting with little or no effort which probably meets the requirements of a large audience.
Mark
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PureRAW seems like a smart product to me. Even if Photo Lab were to become the most popular of the non-Adobe photo editors, it would still have a relatively small fraction of the overall market between the complete dominance by Adobe that shows no signs changing anytime soon combined with so many other options out there. I just hope there are big things planned for PL5 and that their focus doesnāt shift too much towards making software designed to be an add-on piece to other software.
I tried the trial of ON1 Photo RAW 2021 last year when trying to decide what software to move on to from Luminar. It seemed decent enough and had some cool features I wish Photo Lab had but the RAW conversion and noise reduction were so far behind Photo Lab that PL4 ended up being my choice. But recently Iāve watched several videos on Youtube by Jim Nix that were really great edits and have made me at least want give it another go when they inevitably release Photo RAW 2022.
Regarding Luminar, I jumped in back when Luminar 2018 was still out and they were promising Luminar 3 to be this great alternative to Lightroom and their new subscription model. Luminar 3 was a disaster when it released, eventually became usable but still full of bugs, and never got all of the features promised before it was released. Never upgraded to Luminar 4 but it seemed like the story was more of the same with Skylum openly admitting that they prioritized flashy new features and launched the software full of bugs with mediocre performance. I eventually tried the demo of Luminar 4 and while it had some nice features, it also had some of the same unfixed bugs that had been annoying me since Luminar 3 was released. Since they seem unable to live up to their promises with their software and seem to have no problem alienating customers, I moved on and donāt plan to ever go back. But Aurora HDR is pretty good at what it does.
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I gave Luminar AI a go too, also based on demos Iād seen of its sky-replacement AI ā¦ and, for that function, itās absolutely amazing; thereās no effort in replacing a sky with a ācomplicatedā horizon and the result is very impressive.
I was considering using it in a similar way in which I use the Nik tools - that is, as a step following processing with PhotoLab - but, a total negative for me is that Luminar AI does not produce a sidecar file containing the corrections/edits applied to an image ā¦ the details are held, but not in a way that one can easily identify/locate at a file-system level.
John M
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@kokofresha
The introduction of DxO PureRAW is a clever move to attract users of other software to DxO. I donāt see any waste of time here. On the contrary, the basic procedures such as denoising, importing, exporting, rendering, etc. are already available. Programming a customized user interface is trivial and not a waste of time. The proceeds from the sale of PureRAW will be used to develop new processes for Photolab.
Siggi
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
5 Likes
Completely agreed. I too trialed Luminar 4 a couple of years ago and it definitely did have layers and masks(not sure about local adjustments). Theoretically, one could make adjustments on a layer and mask out the areas where the adjustments should not be applied then blend the layer in with an appropriate blending mode. I have taken a more thorough(though not comprehensive) look at Luminar AI and it definitely does not have layers. I did find a local masking brush though, so apparently at least some adjustments can be masked out of some areas. Thatās an improvement.
With regards to OnOne becoming viable in the future, maybe so but they are going to have to start from the ground up and completely revamp their RAW conversion engine. They have made no improvements to it since it first appeared in 2017. I keep hoping they will improve it but year after year they just keep adding new features and neglecting their core, so I wonder if they will ever improve it. I trial it every year and keep saying: āNope, no improvement.ā. I hope they eventually will, but Iām not holding my breath.
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But John, NIK doesnāt produce sidecars either. Maybe it adds something to the DOP files but I donāt think so. Ahh, but NIK will save the edits to a two-page Tiff file though! I get it.
Yes, it can, Mike - - Itās not automatic ā¦ but, this is the practice I follow ā¦ and this feature is included in the new version of SEP too.
I end up with the following files, which allow me to revert to any point in my workflow;
- Source image - a RAW file, in my case
- PL sidecar/.dop
- Nik sidecar/.np
I donāt need to keep the TIFF file that I pass from PL to, say, CEP, 'cos itās reproduceable.
-
I generate this TIFF at full-size, without resizing, so that no interpolation is applied at this step.
āI can use the sidecar/.np file to recall all steps applied in, say CEP, including any Control Points. -
I export a TIFF at full-size from CEP - and then resize that using PL, as itās easier doing so than using Nik Sharpening. Again, I donāt need to keep that TIFF, 'cos itās reproduceable.
Note: I donāt use Nik with every image - but itās great to add āsomething extraā to those that warrant the extra effort (which, in my case, is fewer than Iād like ! )
John
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