I’ve been doing photography off and on for over 30 years, most of which has been done with black and white film. I’ve done a fair bit of shooting with digital, but I have never sat down and properly learned digital photo editing to anywhere near the extent that I learned darkroom manipulations. It is time for me to rectify that. Having used nik silver efex since the days when it was free and owned by google, and not being willing to let Adobe claim rights to my images, purchasing photolab, viewpoint, and the nik collection was a no brainer. The problem is that most in depth photo editing classes, including the ones at all of the colleges near me, use Lightroom, which I am not willing to do. Does anyone know if a full photo editing course akin to what one might get from a 100 or 200 level college course exists for dxo photo editing products? It can be free or paid, that doesn’t matter. Thanks!
Some people here like Photo Joseph’s contributions on youtube.
I liked Anthony Morganti’s contributions, again, on youtube.
There’s really a lot to learn out there. Maybe there’s a photo club around the corner, B&H have things etc. Even if you take a few lessons in Lightroom, you can draw out it’s fundamentals and apply those in PhotoLab, just don’t look at sliders, but at what they are meant to do and how images change when they are pushed and pulled.
Imo, the most important things to know with digital capture and editing are:
never ever burn highlights. Digital is intolerant and what’s gone IS gone.
there are many ways to edit an image and no way is right or wrong - if it get you the image you want. Therefore, make sure that you know what you want with an image and learn how to get there. If you can’t, ask someone, talk.
You might find that some of what people tell you (in tutorials, classes, workshops…) conflicts with that last bullet point above. And that’s okay. If you learn one way, raise your interest and find a different way. Learning one way is doctrine, learning alternative ways unlocks your potential.
If you are seriously thinking about PhotoLab, don’t purchase it before downloading and testing it with the 30-day free trial.
Secondly, the next version of PhotoLab, version 9, will be released in less than 2 months. If you purchase a license for PhotoLab 8 more than a few weeks before the release of PhotoLab 9, and then want to upgrade to the newest version you will have to pay the full upgrade price in addition to your initial purchase. I would suggest holding off making your purchase until PhotoLab 9 is released.
FWIW TuToDxO.com seems to no longer exist. There’s still a home page, but all it’s got is a ‘welcome new user’ message from a (probably French) web hosting company given the link text: “Bienvenu sur votre nouvel herbegement”.
@Pieloe(Pascal) indicated a few months back that with the implementation of PL 9, with so many changes to it, he no longer had the time or assistance to update his tutorials with PL 9’s very significant updates. At the time I assumed he was going to stop supporting the site and apparently he has done that. It was a labor of love by him for a number of years but all good things come to an end eventually.
Thank you for the years you supported TuToDxO. This sight helped me immensely when first learning Photolab. I referred to you instructions many times..
You built a very comprehensive tutorial that covered, with examples, a very significant amount of PhotoLab’s functionality. But, as you pointed out, people seem to want videos, especially videos of modest duration focused on the use of specific features.
My guess is that the majority of PhotoLab users are familiar with only a small fraction of the available functionality and are not interested in taking the time to develop an in-depth understanding of PhotoLab’s full capabilities and potential. That is unfortunate.
As an example, most of the current PL 9 discussions are completely focused on the ongoing AI masking issues that as new functionality in PhotoLab is still in its infancy and is going through growing pains. To my thinking AI masking is still a relatively minor feature among so many gems in PhotoLab. However, many users, especially newer ones, may never take advantage of them, or even know of their existence.
Back in the 80s when I was building software at Lotus Development, we’d say “90-10”, meaning 90% of users use only 10% of the features. When I’d add “and so we can just build the 10%…”, I’d often get a laugh and “It’s not the same ten percent!”. This is not a new phenomenon.
I had similar experiences as a software developer.
Some power users boost their productivity by taking the effort to learn how to use all or most of the functionality of feature rich software like, for example, Microsoft Office. For the overwhelming percentage of non-power users, the much smaller number of features used by them varies significantly depending on their basic requirements and willingness to put in the necessary effort to learn the software. It is the same for all feature rich software including post processing software like DxO’s PhotoLab suite.
I just moved to Photolab9 Elite/FP/VP after many years with Capture One and LR. I find the user manual very well written. There is a lot of depth here and for me it has been very useful.