And when I say YEARS I’m not being dramatic, I mean 2018.
I didn’t upgrade to PL7 until recently because of the dev team’s lack of care to their user base and paying customers. I decided to give DxO a chance because they did fix three important things in the UI:
The new layout is good, it fixes the hovering and clunky Local Adjustments controls.
You can finally control colour locally.
You can now, after many years, flip images horizontally and vertically. This may have been fixed a little before PL7, can’t recall, but is still a recent fix.
However…
The Local Adjustment mask visibility toggle [M] is now broken if no adjustments are made you can’t toggle on/off. It is so annoying.
We still don’t have an image comparison tool, requested millions of times in this forum. FREEWARE does this. 2019, 2018, 2019, and myself in 2022
We still don’t have tint control for RGB images [and now the option is greyed out in the new layout].
We still don’t have customisable hotkeys, super BASIC usability thing. 2019, at least
We still don’t have proper DNG support, only a few select cameras. Who cares about mobile phone users, right? It’s not like anyone shoots on mobile…
We still don’t have the ability to manually apply lens corrections, 2018. Why is this needed? Because DxO PL7 still gets wrong what lens I am using, and despite asking [via the appropriate channel] to include certain lenses to their Optics Profile database, they OF COURSE have neglected this. So it’s a fix for another unfixed issue. Oh and manual lenses with no EXIF also need profile corrections applied manually, but who cares about manual shooters, right?
We still don’t have grid overlays to aid in composition.
We still can’t rotate an image 90° while cropping.
We still don’t have 1-click auto-select. Free apps do this on mobile. PC FREEWARE does this as well. This $300 [+“add-ons”, because God forbid basic geometry tools are included] piece of software can’t do proper auto-anything [auto-mask brush is completely useless].
We still don’t have a working auto-mask brush. You have to manually paint the edges anyway. I’ve tried it extensively.
We still can’t “lock” the UI, it resets every time you restart DxO.
We still can’t decide if we want to add Microcontrast or not, by default, when adjusting Contrast. You gotta opt-out manually.
We still can’t correct green fringing from CA. Purple, yes. Magenta? If PL is feeling like it. Green? Naaah…
I see an almost complete neglect to even the most popular requests in this forum, for years.
I’ve gotten direct responses from them, saying each of those features or fixes have been identified, but no roadmap is given, and certainly most of the fixes or features have not been implemented.
Who knows when or if they will be implemented, DxO could learn from Affinity on how to address issues identified by the community, a.k.a. us, the paying customers.
A very good summary of the lack of innovation (although the word ‘innovation’ to address such basic facilities is, however, a gross exaggeration).
As far as I’m concerned, I’ve lost hope for improvement in this regard.
Looking at the latest release of Dxo Pure Raw in the coming years we can expect
further numbers added to the de-noise module because, as it is well known, the main problem of modern sensors is noise.
Assuming you have a FilmPack license (which is then activated within PL), the Luminosity Mask does a truly easy & excellent job of masking the sky - including any parts of the sky peaking thru foregrounds objects, such as trees, etc.
Summary from my perspective, more and less important:
Crops constrained to levelled image (when Auto has to be resized and moved)
DeepPRIME full preview on demand
‘Deep Blacks’ control
Skin tones control
Dust spots detection with human assisted removal
Halo control for ClearView and Microcontrast
Return to the last photo previewed upon PL restart
Expose and document tuning parameters for advanced users
Tone Curve rework
SmartLighting further tuning, add more control
Auto mask based on Luminance and Color
False color (type of Moire) fixing (with some demosaic control)
Maze control for DeepPRIME
Diffraction treatment
Denoise the History, make it persistent on Windows
Rework/addition of renderings
RAW histograms
Some of the above may be computationally intensive, so not sure if all users would like it.
After all, keeping the workflow smooth is the key thing to stay.
Contrary to many here, I wouldn’t like Selective Tones to be more selective, as I suspect color shifts would appear, like in other software; the ‘deep blacks’ being an exception.
I know the control lines very well and use them as a workaround as we do not have automatic sky masking up to now.
But it’s sometimes really annoying especially when you also have bright elemets in your main pic. (I know how to deal with it, but it’s sometimes really a lot of work to do .,…)
No, I don’t, and honestly I don’t know why I should buy any film simulations (which I never use) to get a masking functionality which should belong to the base tool. It’s just a bad method to push FP sales and I will not support this.
Mentioned above by Wlodek, but the current Tone Curve implementation is crap. This is especially frustrating since the Tone Curves in other DxO products (Nik and Filmpack) are much better. Whoever is responsible for the PL user interface knows absolutely nothing about photography.
While cropping you can rotate up to 45°, and if you want to change from portrait to horizontal or the other way around, you have to get out of the crop tool, right click > submenu > change orientation, then enter crop tool again, then adjust your rotation…
The grid overlay is arbitrarily chosen by DxO. Like thirds, golden ratio, golden spiral, or other aspect ratios to see how they would frame, that’s what I mean.
And yeah, I left out the “hard” things to implement because… well, it is simply unrealistic. Focus stacking, averaging frames, panorama stitching… =]
Wow - this was post was hidden because “it’s not relevant”. It is extremely relevant, as the screenshot of DxO PL7’s website’s frontpage proves DxO is making a false claim. This thread states how this software is NOT what it is being advertised as, lacking basic features found even in freeware, which DxO has acknowledged, and ignores users’ requests and feedback for years, also proved in this thread.
