Exactly this!
In the end you may find (as I do) that the “second program” works fine for the majority of work one has to do and that DxO is only used for fringe cases where the “second program” does not deliver.
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I’ve been making your point in this forum for several years now (you can check). But life is short, and I’ve moved on.
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In fact DxO PL has the capability to demosaic phone DNG files. It still supports older iPhones. Why doesn’t DxO keep up with the most posular iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones ? DxO is lagging behind others, but should aim high.
See for erxample Halide presented with Apple ProRAW here :
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Did (do) those older phones use Apple ProRAW or what format did they use?
And isn’t demosaicing already applied to ProRAW? Which would mean there is nothing for PL to demosaic.
I am not knowledgeable about the ProRAW format, but from what I’ve just read it appears you are correct. Apple ProRAW files seem to already be demosaiced. If that is correct, even if DxO supported the format, it is unlikely that DeepPRIME and XD could be applied to ProRaw files because by design these AI based NR tools are integrated into the demosaicing process.
Mark
I don’t know the version of the dng specification used by these older iPhones, but they are correctly processed by Photolab.
It is equally important to understand that Photolab relies on a builtin list of supported phones and their raw formats.
The models supported are baked in the photolab application. For example, PL can process iPhone 8 Plus dng files, but not those from Samsung Galaxy series. With an easy manipulation, you can fool photolab into decoding some dng files produced by Samsung phones.
See this : While waiting for a smartphone/dng solution from DXO PL - #5 by Joachim
Why did editing some characters in EXIF work a few years ago but not with ProRAW now?
I have not tried feeding ProRAW iles to Photolab yet.
It is clear that without DxO support for ProRAW, or for any added feature in the latest dng specification, Photolab won’t be able to take advantage of it. – for example the scene-specific processing stored by an iPhone in ProRAW.
Perhaps this information will be of help to you:
And also:
As Alok Deshpande, Apple’s Senior Manager of Camera Software Engineering, explained, ProRaw “provides many of the benefits of our multi-frame image processing and computational photography, like Deep Fusion and Smart HDR, and combines them with the depth and flexibility of a raw format”.
above quote from: What is Apple ProRaw? The new iPhone 12 Pro photo format explained | TechRadar
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dng formats are used by manufacturers to implement diverse raw strategies ranging from un-demosaiced sensor data to demosaicked linear data.
The benefits of dng format over jpeg include the absence of jpg compression artifacts, more than 8-bit quantization, thus higher dynamic range, and sensor-specific color before balancing.
These dng capabilities already benefit other image editors, but DxO has not kept up with support for newer smartphones.
The discussion about classic camera raw files vs smartphone raw files misses the point that users do not care much about the technology itself; users want an easy workflow, using the tools they already use, with quality end results.
Thus reference might also be useful : Lightroom now supports Apple iPhone 13 ProRAW DNGs directly - Life after Photoshop
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Isn’t that exactly the point? The senior manager from Apple quoted above says that himself: ProRAW is the result something that Apple does with the iPhones actual RAW.
Consider this: Why can’t you work on InDesign files in PhotoShop? They are both some flat image file format. Or why can’t you simply open 3d scenes from Maya in Blender? They are after all both 3d scenes made up of vertices.
And why aren’t there any cars for me to drive around in Witcher like I can in GTA? The character can be controlled with keyboard and mouse in both games. Though here I suppose I could create a drivable car for Witcher - if I learned and put the effort into understanding how it works first.
jpg vs dng: Unless for web output for which I’d use jpg, I’d likely use 16-bit tif instead.
This definately applies to some user groups. I’m not interested in using Lightroom by the way, or an iPhone camera - unless I needed a hand held 3d scanner.