Part 2 - Off-Topic - advice, experiences, and examples for images being processed in DxO Photolab

[mikemyers]

@mwsilvers

The main purpose of PhotoLab is not to fix things in poorly captured images but to finish already well captured images with a variety of tools that generally far exceed the capabilities of most cameras and the proprietary software their manufacturers provide. The goal is to use these tools to fulfill a photographers intended vision.

I’ve always had software on my computers that could edit my photographs. Before PhotoLab, it was Adobe Lightroom. To me, it was a collection of tools (specifically designed for working with RAW images.

Sorry, but I don’t have a “main purpose” for PhotoLab. As my image editor, I use it for anything and everything, both to improve “poorly captured images” and to finish "already well captured images. With my camera, there are times when I just “do the best I can”, and there are other times when I think the captured image is already perfect.

Probably the number one tool for me involves “cropping”, ensuring that images are level, and that they mostly include the purpose of my image.

At Joanna’s suggestion, I did download Nikons NX Studio. My laptop also has Photomatix, Luminar, Photoshop, Lightroom, and an old installation of DarkTable. For various reasons, 99% of the time I use PhotoLab, Version 6. My desktop has several more photo editors, that I never installed on my laptop. I’ve also got the original version of NIK, and DxO’s version, neither of which I use.

@mwsilvers

While it can also be used to “fix things” that is only a secondary advantage.

I assume you meant “for you”. Any and all “fixing” that I do, is done in PhotoLab. For me, it’s an all-purpose do-anything software for people who shoot in RAW format.

Why am I paying for my subscription to Adobe’s “photography plan” and also buying PhotoLab? To be honest, that’s mostly due to people in this forum, especially Joanna. She shows me why I might “need” a new version, and I’ve now got versions 3, 4, 5, and 6. I never saw a reason to update to 7.

I think most people are “opinionated”, and that includes me. That, and "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it".

Life would be very different for me, but for this forum.

[mwsilvers (Mark - New Jersey, USA)]

@mikemyers

I assume you meant “for you”. Any and all “fixing” that I do, is done in PhotoLab. For me, it’s an all-purpose do-anything software for people who shoot in RAW format.

No I do not mean specifically for me. PhotoLab wss never designed as a tool to fix problem images, either was Lightroom. The fact that they can fix many problems is a merely secondary advantage which is helpful for those with problem images.

PhotoLab was designed to help photographers bring their already well captured images to the next level. You just don’t use PhotoLab in the way it was intended. At most you tend to use it like a bandaid to make images with issues more acceptable. Even with regard to that you don’t take advantage of most of the tools which can make poorly captured images look so much better.

I’m guessing that you do not use, or even know how to use, between 50% and 75% of the functionality in PhotoLab. Considering how much you post and how much time you’ve spent here, you should be intimately familiar with virtually every feature in PhotoLab That is the reason I strongly suggested that you would do better to familiarize yourself with Nikon’s NX Studio.

By the way, when I refer to PhotoLab, I mean the entire PhotoLab suite including Viewpoint and FilmPack. Anything less is a serious functional compromise.

Mark

[mwsilvers (Mark - New Jersey, USA)]

@mikemyers

I think most people are “opinionated”, and that includes me. That, and "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix

You are free to do whatever you want with your photographs and process them to any extent that makes you happy.

It has been my experience that the overwhelming number photographs taken by most people will improve dramatically if processed in post appropriately.

Mark

[mikemyers]

@mwsilvers

PhotoLab was designed to help photographers bring their already well captured images to the next level. You just don’t use PhotoLab in the way it was intended. At most you tend to use it like a bandaid to make images with issues more acceptable. Even with regard to that you don’t take advantage of most of the tools which can make poorly captured images look so much better.

Let’s stick with this one thing, what is PhotoLab for. Here is the DxO page listing six reasons for going to PhotoLab:

What’s most important to me:
1 - lens corrections
2 - noise reduction
4 - local adjustments
5 - file management
6 - perpetual license

It does everything I want, and a lot more, including the things you want.

You’re right, there is a huge number of tools that I haven’t yet learned or taken advantage of. Maybe sometime. Also, to me, there is only other software package that comes close, Lightroom.

With much of the DxO software, I feel like an algebra student walking into a calculus class. It’s bewildering. But for PhotoJoseph, and Joanna, and their ability to teach others, I would be a lot worse.

Since nobody else is asking for assistance here, am I to assume that everyone in this forum understands PhotoLab as well as you?

[mikemyers]

@mwsilvers

It has been my experience that the overwhelming number photographs taken by most people will improve dramatically if processed in post appropriately.

I’m absolutely sure you are correct.

It seems like I am the only person here asking for help.
Why is that?

…and what the heck, here is a question for all the other zillions of people reading this forum, do you already know everything, or why are you not asking for help to improve?

I suspect that while you are helping me, you are also helping all of them, even if they don’t ask for the help. Or, they already know enough to get by.

[mwsilvers (Mark - New Jersey, USA)]

@mikemyers

Since nobody else is asking for assistance here, am I to assume that everyone in this forum understands PhotoLab as well as you?

I obviously cannot answer that question. I have no idea how my level of knowledge compares to others. I am probably more knowledgeable than many people and less knowledgeable than many others.

Although you may find this insulting, I do not mean it that way. PhotoLab is not complex like Photoshop. It has a simple interface and a comparatively small number of features. if you want me to be honest I have to tell you that you appear to be by far the least knowledgeable regular poster on this forum. When you consider how long you’ve been here, how many posts you’ve written and how many responses you’ve gotten, It is beyond comprehension how little you still know about the software. And most of what you do know is only a result of us spoon feeding it to you over the last couple of years.

Mark

[mikemyers]

What I think I try to do with my camera, is capture what’s going on around me, whether it’s organized, or overwhelming. I see the image in the viewfinder, and where people are, and what’s going on, at try to press the shutter release when I see the effect I’m after.

This is my final photo here from my recent trip, back when I was in Manhattan. My brother went into a shop, and I was watching the street, feeling… well overwhelmed. Too much going on, moving in every which direction, too many signs, often conflicting, and all of it filling my viewfinder, waiting for me to pick the best moment to freeze everything in time. If there are people, I like to have them doing whatever it is they’re doing, so they add to the image.

The only real editing I did was whacking off the right side of the image which didn’t add anything useful.

If I was mailing people back home “what was New York like?”, I might select this image. For various reasons, I like the way I captured what I felt was a frozen moment in time, and the fellow at the left very much added to that. The image is as dis-organized as I felt, standing there.

780_5441 | 2024-05-30.nef (31.2 MB)
780_5441 | 2024-05-30.nef.dop (15.7 KB)

It’s difficult for me, but I will start looking for artistic images to create, with color, and shapes, and forms, and maybe even some connection to reality. Maybe that will lead me to some of the qualities that so many of you feel are important in photography.

[mikemyers]

@mwsilvers

I have to tell you that you appear to be by far the least knowledgeable regular poster on this forum.

I just scrolled backwards in time, and I could only find four people also posting photos in this thread. Other than you, Joanna, and Stenis, there are almost no photos being posted. I agree with your conclusion. Time to move on…

[Stenis (Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))]

Can be of just that type of tektonic activity. Scandinavia is actually tipping. Sweden is sinking in the south end and rising in the north and more and more the more to the north we get.

That headline was not written by me. It was the headline of the article. But the elevation especially in the north has been pretty spectacular - and costly too.

Netherlands is a very spectacular example too and down there you will have really severe challenges in the future. I’m old enough to remember when your walks broke and wast areas were floded.

We have floding every spring when the ice “goes” in all our rivers and this year was no exception after a terrible winter with lots of snow and thick ice.

[mwsilvers (Mark - New Jersey, USA)]

@mikemyers

I just scrolled backwards in time, and I could only find four people also posting photos in this thread. Other than you, Joanna, and Stenis, there are almost no photos being posted. I agree with your conclusion. Time to move on…

The number of photos posted has absolutely nothing to do with it. I have read virtually every single post on this forum in the last seven years, somewhere around 123,000 of them. They were posted by hundreds of different people. And I can tell as a result of that experience the amount of knowledge you have compared to others. Is minimal and not a whole lot more than a newbie. Considering the degree of your presence here that is the main reason I often get frustrated with you.

Mark

[Stenis (Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))]

@mwsilvers

It has been my experience that the overwhelming number photographs taken by most people will improve dramatically if processed in post appropriately.

That is my experience too. I have really hard to understand the reasons why modern photographers should say no to postprocessing.

There is only one reason I understand and that was when I understood a local photographer here, so well known for his cutting and pasting of animals into pictures with suitable backgrounds, despite pretending not doing so, that they turned his name into a verb.

Saying you nowadays always create your pictures in the camera - always using JPEG right out of the camera without postprocessing - is a good shield against all sorts of suspicion for not playing by the rules when you always can blame your camera for the outcome.

… but that is about the only reason I can come up with.

I’m just going through a lot of my early digital safari images from East Africa and is pretty surprised of how flat, boring, color-, saturation- and contrast-less they look before postprocessing normally.

It is really like Joanna wrote earlier that the light conditions often isn 't optimal at all and especially in bright daylight. That just need to be handled in quite a few ways. Of some reason all my Sony-cameras have been overexposing in bright daylight 0,7 - 1 Ev.

I never add any pictures these days to my archive without culling and processing them. Because I really have hard to see anything interesting in images that I haven’t tried to develop to their full potential.

If it is anything a god converter does to a picture it is to reduce the dynamic range. We often read about modern cameras fantastic dynamic ranges of 15 steps or so. What we rarely talk about is that pictures like that isn’t all that interesting for our eyes since they look far to uncontrasty for most peoples taste. So after a proper postprocessing there might just be 7 to nine steps left inorder to increase the contrast. A picture like that will be seen as much more pleasing for most peoples eyes,

Very few people I think will prefer the image as it was right out of the camera despite the camera-processes have improved over the years. I can honestly say I have never really liked my JPEG-files right from my cameras ever and so far I have had 10 Sony system cameras. You tell me - maybe Canon or Nikon is better.

Below you find a picture of an elephant I took a long time ago. It is sharp enough to use but has a dynamic range that makes it really flat and uninteresting. It is a good example of how flat and uninteresting some of these safari pictures looked without postprocessing right out of the camera. The background is pretty disturbing. So, in short, I did like the subject, but not the background. So, in this case I decided to get rid of the background and make an elephant portrait that I called “The pissing elephant”. It is the same elephant but not very much else is the same. I think this original unprocessed picture is a very typical example of how it often looks if the pictures are taken during game drives in the middle of the day.

Click to zoom!

Click to zoom!

[mwsilvers (Mark - New Jersey, USA)]

@mikemyers

If I was mailing people back home “what was New York like?”, I might select this image. For various reasons, I like the way I captured what I felt was a frozen moment in time, and the fellow at the left very much added to that. The image is as dis-organized as I felt, standing there.

I was born and raised in the City of New York. For 15 years as an adult, I lived in Manhattan and had apartments in Greenwich village and later on the east side on 30th Street. I can say with knowledge and experience that photo does not represent New York in any way.

A photo of New York should capture the life, the vibrancy and the excitement of a large and active population going about their daily lives in an extraordinarily busy place. There is really nothing like that in this rather sedate image of a few people walking on the street, a few cars on the road, and a street corner with no particularly interesting looking buildings or shops. Given all the choices of images that a trip to New York City would have provided, why do you think this rather boring photograph is indicative of your experience?

Mark

[mikemyers]

@mwsilvers

Considering the degree of your presence here that is the main reason I often get frustrated with you.

I get frustrated with myself too.

@mwsilvers

The number of photos posted has absolutely nothing to do with it.

I would think the other way around, with the goal being better images, because of the tools offered by PhotoLab.

Anyone can type anything, but there are a very limited number of people posting their photos here that show their ability, along with their understanding of those tools. But enough of that. To me, the most important thing is what is captured when I press the shutter release. With enough skill, there might be minimal need for editing.

To be honest, what any of you capture with your camera is of far more interest (to me) than what you can do in editing. That’s just my attitude, and my opinion. With the proper camera settings, there might be no need for editing.

[Stenis (Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))]

@mwsilvers

I’m guessing that you do not use, or even know how to use, between 50% and 75% of the functionality in PhotoLab.

We can only guess. I think I have used most of the functions in Photolab but I also know from my time as a product manager for all Microsofts products in the first years of the nineties that the general user of Excel and Word for Windows according to the results of their usability studies they did just used between 5 to 10 % of these applications functions.

After that Microsoft totally redesigned the menu system and added so called “ribbons” instead and to simplify more complicated workflow processes they added so called “wizards”.

Photolab has a pretty resonable learning curve but I remembered Capture One say five years ago. just to make a dodge or burn was no joke. The learning curve became a growing problem as more and more really sofisticated functions were introduced. So, say three years ago they started to simplify and improve many of the workflows in Capture One that people had been complaining about.

It is not easy these days to design software because people don’t read manuals anymore like we did once up on a time. Today all younger users expect everything to be self explaining, obvious and intuitive. If it isn’t they will not use it and goes elsewhere and it is here AI-supported functions will be so important for the future.

[mikemyers]

@mwsilvers

Given all the choices of images that a trip to New York City would have provided, why do you think this rather boring photograph is indicative of your experience?

Because this photo expresses how I felt, standing there.

@mwsilvers

A photo of New York should capture the life, the vibrancy and the excitement of a large and active population going about their daily lives in an extraordinarily busy place.

That is the photo that you would have wanted to take, just like eight million other people. I wanted to capture how I felt, at that particular moment. I have 20 years worth of photos I took of NYC growing up there, but that’s not what I wanted to photograph this trip. I didn’t want the “tourist photos”. I wanted to capture my own feelings. If it’s boring, so be it.

[mwsilvers (Mark - New Jersey, USA)]

@mikemyers

I would think the other way around, with the goal being better images, because of the tools offered by

This site is not a photo discussion site. It dedicated to the tools that DXO makes. As such there can be extensive discussion about the tools without ever seeing a photograph.

I’ve been active over the years on dozens of sites dedicated to the specific software of different vendors, and none of them have large numbers of photographs… This site like most of the others is not primarily intended as a learning site or a photo analysis site.

It is intended for users to ask questions or share information and knowledge about the products being offered. After being here for so long it is easy for me to glean from the content of their posts the amount of knowledge they possess . What I know about you lack of accumulated knowledge has very little to do with the mages you posted. It is entirely based on what you say in your posts.

Mark

[mwsilvers (Mark - New Jersey, USA)]

@mikemyers

That is the photo that you would have wanted to take, just like eight million other people. I wanted to capture how I felt, at that particular moment. I have 20 years worth of photos I took of NYC growing up there, but that’s not what I wanted to photograph this trip. I didn’t want the “tourist photos”. I wanted to capture my own feelings. If it’s boring, so be

My point is that you would give that photo to others as a representation of what New York City is like when it in fact it does not even remotely represent what New York is like… Again it’s your photo so do whatever you want with it. I am just completely amazed and flabbergasted that having visited New York City you feel that image conveys the most important impression it made on you and represents the essence of New York. The mind reels.

Having lived in New York City my entire life until the age of 39 It is actually insulting that you somehow believe that flat boring photo is somehow representative of the essence the city I grew up in and loved.

It would be like photographing a small back street somewhere in London with a couple of inconsequential, uninteresting, and unattractive buildings with a couple of people walking about and giving it to others as a representation of what London is like…

Mark

[mwsilvers (Mark - New Jersey, USA)]

@mikemyers

I would think the other way around, with the goal being better images, because of the tools offered by PhotoLab.

And you would be wrong. You like to make a lot of assumptions without any evidence to back it up. If you actually read what other people wrote in other threads with as much involvement as you do with your own posts in your own threads you would know that. You’re participation here has been almost entirely in your own threads for your own benefit. You knew very little about PhotoLab when you got here a couple years ago years and know very little more now than you did then. I know this not from your photos but from your words.

Mark

[mikemyers]

@mwsilvers

This site like most of the others is not primarily intended as a learning site or a photo analysis site…It is intended for users to ask questions or share information and knowledge about the products being offered.

I’m astonished. I guess that explains what I have not heard back from all but one of the people I’ve supposedly convinced that PhotoLab was the best image editing tool for anyone who shots in RAW. They all gave up on it, and the one person who I know for sure who actually bought a copy has told me he has gone back to Lightroom.

I suggest we create a new forum here for newcomers, specifically intended to be used as a “learning site”. I’m sure now this will be ignored. So be it.

I have learned more of what I need to learn from Joanna than from any other source, with the possible exception of PhotoJoseph, but he doesn’t answer questions. I haven’t seen any webinars lately from PhotoJoseph either (but I haven’t looked, me bad).

Forget everything I’ve written about this - obviously a bad assumption on my part. But I’ve found the discussions here fascinating, and I’m certainly learning new things constantly. Thanks to you, and everyone, for that.

[mikemyers]

@mwsilvers

I know this not from your photos but from your words.

That explains a lot. Reminds me of an old saying, too…

“The proof is in the pudding is an expression that means the value, quality, or truth of something must be judged based on direct experience with it—or on its results . The expression is an alteration of an older saying that makes the meaning a bit clearer: the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

I think there should be more photos here, and fewer words.