My local photo club has asked me to make a presentation of DXO Photolab. I have used DXO for years and know the program well. But I suspect that most of my photo friends are using Adobe products, Lightroom and/or Photoshop. Based on their experience with these, what questions should I be prepared to answer? Since I am not familiar with Lightroom and Photoshop, I do hope some of you can provide me with some information. What will the more important differences between the two be, from a Lightroom users’ point of view?
Among the strengths of DXO are lens correction and noise reduction – but my understanding is that also Lightroom offers both?
One of the weak points of DXO is the handling of DNG.
Adobe uses “layers”, DXO does not – or at least not as pronounced. Local mascs are a sort of layers, are they not?
Adobe users have to import all the files, two times. First to the computer, and then into Lightrooms database. DXO just use windows explorer and the existing folder structure, and similar for Mac users, I suppose. For me, the DXO way is much better.
My goal is to give a neutral, sober and good presentation of DXO, not to “sell” it as something far better than everything else.
Any input will be appreciated.
Well, as you say, you don’t know about LR and PS …
Then why do you want to prepare for questions about differences, etc.?
Just show how you work and the “anticipated” questions (which you can’t answer anyway if in doubt) will come by themselves.
( have been in photoclubs for years )
Why not ask a few members of the photo club. They might know what they are interested in.
Alternatively, you could do your presentation in two steps: 1) collect questions and 2) select most important questions and show how to do it in DPL.
I would describe the process that you have found to be easy to repeat. Then you have a fixed guideline and your audience can use your presentation to reproduce photo editing with a Photolab demo. I would also mention that ViewPoint and FilmPack are necessary for important functions. I would put the discussion about certain functions and a different process with LR/Photoshop at the end, because opinions will then differ widely - see this forum.
If you want to make photolab shine where it is better (it is not everywhere), just take one well exposed and focused raw, do a basic demosaicing with lens correction and noise reduction only (deeprime for photolab) in both softwares and you should generally see a visible difference in sharpness and details in favor to photolab.
EDIT : put sharpness to its old 0 default value instead of the new 1 default value in photolab to do this.
Thank you for the input and advice.
I have prepared a grainy ISO 25.600 to show the noise reduction and an image taken with 7mm with quite a bit of barrelling. Both will show the strengths of DXO PL.
You can continue to use Lightroom Classic for digital asset management, and process your raw files in PhotoLab via a plugin.
DxO lens correction and Lightroom lens correction are quite different. Most software will correct distortion and aberration. DxO also corrects softness across the image, but not uniformly. Most lenses will be sharp in the centre and softest at the corners — DxO specifically addresses this.
Lightroom has long had basic noise reduction akin to PhotoLab’s “High Quality”. They recently added their Machine Learning system, but I have found it cumbersome to use because you have to do a conversion first. Some people say it does a great job, despite that limitation, but in my limited testing it could not handle some high ISO shots that PhotoLab could. That was comparing against DeepPRIME. DeepPRIME XD2, again in my limited testing, is a level up again.
Not really true. I use Lightroom to manage my photos and only import once. I start LR, plug in my SD card and tell it where to put the photos. It even ejects the card so I can simply remove it when done.
Likewise, there is nothing stopping you pointing PhotoLab directly at your memory card. I don’t recommend it, but you can.
This difference is a double-edged sword. Some people hate the idea of “importing” (even though it’s simple and quick) and insist they should be able to look at any folder of images. The downside of this is a fair amount of the time you have to wait on the thumbnails to render. As the owner of a brand new M3 Pro MacBook Pro with a ridiculously fast SSD, that’s still annoying to me. So much so I set the thumbnail cache to its highest value and went visiting every folder of images and scrolling all of them until all thumbnails rendered. Even now I visit some folders and find the rendering happens again. At 30+ MB per file, it’s not super fast — about 3-4 images per second. Lightroom renders a whole screen of thumbnails from its thumbnail cache in less time than DxO does 3-4 images, and scrolling is then super fast.
This old chestnut. “DNG” is an overloaded term. I shoot native DNG in my camera and PhotoLab has no problems with it, as is true for all supported cameras that can shoot straight to DNG and also all supported cameras’ native formats converted to DNG if done by Adobe DNG Converter.
What PhotoLab does not support is arbitrary DNG files. This is because DNG files can be created in a huge number of ways from a huge number of sources. It does support any TIFF or JPG, but those types of image are already converted to “RGB” and you do not get to use DxO noise reduction other than “High Quality”. I believe the only reason these exist is because people have old images in JPEG format, and TIFF is a widely used interchange format for higher quality.
The simple way to put this… PhotoLab supports listed cameras and lenses. It also allows most functions on JPEG and TIFF files. Don’t even mention DNG unless someone brings it up. If the file comes out of a supported camera, PhotoLab will load it. Most people won’t care to do an out-of-camera conversion to DNG anyway, I think. What I think most people want “DNG support” for is whatever thing they have that creates DNG. In almost all cases, TIFF is just as good.
The only real problem here is people who receive DNG files and cannot control their source. This seems to be limited to museums/libraries and the like. Either convert to TIFF or use something other than PhotoLab is the answer there.
Now cue the “well actually…” responses. I say the only contentious paragraph here is the preceding one. The rest is just how things are — or at least ways of looking at it.
You need to check that you’re not comparing apples to oranges then.
Example Import:
- The first import is the same, no matter what apps one uses: Copy files from the camera to the computer
- The second import is explicit in Lightroom (the user has to tell LrC to catalog the files). The second import is implicit in PhotoLab which catalogs every image file it sees without the user’s consent. Whether one is better than the other is really a matter of preference. Some like to be in control (at the price of having to do something), others like to be served (at the cost of having rubbish in the catalog, like e.g. clicking on the folder of the memory card which gets formatted later, leaving orphaned entries in DPL’s catalog).
With the caveat that the first and second import can be done in one operation in Lightroom.
Yes, and I choose to not mention it for various reasons. One being the potential for discussion during the presentation. Moreover, Lightroom can also back up the imported images at the same time. Lightroom import is a three-in-one operation if we choose it to be.
This discussion will become inevitable anyway, so best to be prepared and have some answers ready about how to find/organize images within PL and how to see their edits outside of it in one of the many workaround side-apps PL users ares so deeply in love with?
One issue with such a presentation is to not know what people expect. There is a fair chance of frustration on both sides…and I’d not get into such a task without exploring the interest of the spectators first.
@Joachim seems to be Lightroom agnostic, which makes the task even more demanding…unless the presentation showed a complete workflow, also addressing keywords and other metadata and aspects like usability and reliability. Just presenting marketing material and wording provides no decent service imo.
Maybe, the following site could help @Joachim with a few real-life aspects:
please fill us in how it goes
If you don’t know Lightroom and Photoshop, it’s better not to make presentation about them. It can be a disaster.
By my experience DxO has support just for few cameras and lenses. Adobe has it for all.
The only plus of DxO is good noise reduction. But also that is not seen online. I proces photos in Lightroom or Photoshop Elements and I make noise reduction with Topaz Denoise AI and sharpen with Topaz Sharpen AI. It’s far the best result.
…to present PhotoLab from a very personal point of view: Show a few edits and tell people about what you did, what you like/dislike and why.i
If your audience is thinking and acting in structured ways, a more systematic presentation might be more adequate.
If you define “just a few” as hundreds of cameras (over 100 Canon models alone) and thousands of lenses.
The only plus for you.
The best result for you.
It has been generally reported here and elsewhere that some photos Topaz does a better job and some DxO does a better job.
Clearly DxO has something worthwhile, or why else are you making comments here when you claim to only use Adobe and Topaz products?
I have 3 cameras: Panasonic FZ-50, Panasonic FZ-100 and Nikon P9500. No one is supported by DxO, although the support prommised it half of year ago.
Mentioned Panasonics have absolutly no support. Nikon supports just focus 24mm, but results with zoom are catastrophy.
I would like photographers to know, that DxO is not the only and the best of the best option.
I don’t think there are many here of that opinion so you may be wasting your words and time.
I can show you a photo after sharpening in DxO and the same after sharpening with Topaz. There’s a big big difference.
DxO processing.tif (17,2 MB)
Sharpening Topaz.tif (17,2 MB)
Bogdan