The question is whether this will be enough to persuade new buyers to purchase the product. Unfortunately, in addition to DxO Photolab Elite, you also have to buy 2 other products to be able to use everything in PL. On the whole, however, there is a lack of innovation.
Not adding at least some of the features would be a disincentive for PL customers and a push of PL users towards the competitors.
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and this makes it quite expensive !
Certainly, we can expect whatever we want…but it doesn’t forcibly make things happen.
The more we expect, the less we get.
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Thought experiment only - I haven’t tried this…
Why stick with PL when a person could process the RAW file in PR4, gaining access to XD2, then proceed into NIK for all the tone, color, effects. Doesn’t this accomplish what PL does?
Many PL users are effectively doing a similar 2-step process by generating an intermediate DNG with the optical and denoise technologies baked in before applying the tone, color, and effects with the idea that this workflow provides better control of these final steps.
PL’s DAM is already weak, so each user could choose what works for them. Adobe Bridge is free and does more than PL.
Presets are numerous in PR4 and NIK.
If someone is using these packages with LR (or LR standalone) they are already doing a 2-step process with the tools in LR/PS/BR thrown in as a bonus.
What special features does PL have over the workflows above?
In theory, one could upgrade PR and NIK separately as befits the user rather than hope for what DxO decided what to include in PL.
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The special thing about PL is the one step processing.
I tried Lightroom and I found out that I don’t like these intermediate files which need a lot of space an need to be deleted at the end because they don’t show the final result. THe same would happen if I combine different DxO tools.
Waste of time (due to different steps in different tools) and waste of disk and/or cloud space
sure, but which tool of DxO offers this? I was just referring to what is already available and could easily be implemented without causing significant development costs.
I too would like as seemless a workflow as possible, however, perhaps I should revise my question to emphasis that…
Has anyone tried the combo of PR4 XD2 denoising with the new standalone NIK to comment on whether or not integrating these two products in a new PL would be a valuable or worthwhile one-step workflow?
In PL, the denoising algorithm is applied on export. Also, some sharpening effects are not applied unless the photo is zoomed to 75%. So I sometimes do a back and forth to tune these adjustments. This effectively becomes a two-step (or more) workflow.
I sampled PR4’s XD2 denoising and found it reduced the fringing and halos in high contrast edges in all the samples I tried. It also provides a larger preview window to better tune the denoising? The samples I tried were of birds against a bright sky, but at least I could see the effects before “export”. Batch processing 100 photos with PR4 did take a bit of time but focused on other things during that period. This success leads me to toy with reverting to older two-step workflow where I batch demosaicked before further processing.
While I really like Control points/lines, I struggle with getting the correct balance of +/- CPs to mask an irregular object (bird) or similar color/tonality areas (brown bird on brown tree). The autobrush struggles too. Hence my interest in the new NIK tools and perhaps their tuneable presets.
If the combo of these two products are a good match it seems like a no-brainer to integrate these into the PL. That’s a provisonal “wish”. I think this would help DxO’s development cycle if these “modules” could be placed in PL for these users, or as plugins for other workflows.
Separately,
improvements in PL’s DAM (keywording and batch renaming for me) as well as the ability to compare 4 selected photos (culling and adjustments) would be great too.
DxO’s denosing/demosaicking technology is the most important part of their suite of tools in my workflow. Currently PR4 seems ahead.
PureRAW is a simplified subset of PhotoLab, therefore its functionality is already integrated in DPL, except for XD2 denoising, which I suppose will appear in DPL sooner or later.
Nik Collection apps currently only handle TIFF and JPEG files and are therefore not ready to be integrated in DPL like DFP and DVP.
How DxO packages functionalities is mainly a question of maximising revenue/effort, which is perfectly okay for any profit oriented company. Integrating all if Nik’s features into DPL would, imo, take too much effort and the resulting product would have to be too expensive.
Check out your bakery: selling a cake piece by piece makes it sell easier and at better profit.
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But my bakery sells complete cakes for a reasonable price, too
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Or make people don’t like this and go away (I know several people waiting v8 to choose their next boat - I’m one of them of course).
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Introducing the elliptical U-Points and the polygon masks would be a good reason to keep some customers as long as the automask functionalioty does not work as expected. At automasking Lightroom has a huge lead (main subject detection, sky masking, …) and I did not see any attempts of DxO in the past to improve something for automasking.
Before auto-masking/AI masking etc it would be nice if either the masks are appropriately updated following a subsequent geometry change, as is the case with LrC or COP.
If that is too difficult, at least there should be a warning message if you try to change geometry (perspective, horizon, reshape, etc) on an image with one or more local edits.
(And while you are at it, fix the undo system in PL8 - I am fed up of hitting CMD-Z to undo keyword changes only to have the program undo whatever last visual edit was made instead!)
My words … basics like a state of the art masking functionality
yes, unfortunately. it would be nice if the products were combined. as i no longer take part in every update, i’m probably no longer a beta tester.
If I was sarcastic, I would say that DXO can not kill its goose that lays the golden egg.
Everything said here goes towards common sense but I doubt we could be heard. It’s not only the thoughts of dxo’s customers but also of “external” actors of the photography that review DXO product and point some incoherences for example when we should add a FP to get a luminosity mask already offered by the competitors.
New features are released sparingly and dispatched among the DXO products to force us to subscribe in all the products sometimes just for one feature needed like the luminosity mask that should be part of PhotoLab and that is not a specific feature of that add-on…
Should we buy all the add-ons to compose a product 100% operational ? It’s a marketing strategy but one thing to keep in mind is that Dxo is a professional product designed mainly for professional photographers and our annual budget allocated for a Photo solution is a huge part of our buying decision. I have updated my PL, and NIK but not FP this year after leaving Dxo for Lightroom but I’m already tired to juggle with add-ons , their updates, the features that are “already” in PL and that are “just” waiting to be activated (one hundred of euros more…) . I would appreciate to play with the luminosity mask but I will not update my FP only for that new feature that once again is not a specific FP feature and should be available for all the DXO products included the Nik software. I believe it’s only included into one of the Nik softwares (SilverFx). It’s really frustrating to see how a company can ruin it potential in a very competitive market and knowing it suffered from bankruptcy in 2018.
All those hidden features and costs are not sustainable in a professional activity and I ask myself if finally it’s not worse than the subscription business model of an Adobe that finally offers more for cheaper. It’s not only features that needs the successor of PL7 but a complete review of all the products and a long term strategic vision before the next bankruptcy…
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This is something that I have posted so many times now that I’ve lost track. Filmpack and Viewpoint are not traditional add-ins to PhotoLab. The functionality for both are already built into PhotoLab. All that a license for those two products does is unhide those features. Of course, in addition, you also get a standalone version of each but I never install them or use them.
If you want the full PhotoLab experience you need PhotoLab Elite, Viewpoint, and FilmPack. Besides providing a standalone version for Viewpoint and FilmPack, this approach also allows users to purchase most of the PhotoLab experience for a lot less money by not purchasing those additional licenses.
Most of us long-term users on this site understand the value of owning all three. Is it an expensive proposition? Yes of course. But for me, and many others here, it is well worth the cost.
Mark
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Bad example. No bakery sells any cake for which a customer needs two extra licenses to eat the cream and the cherries included in the cake. And btw., a standalone version of film pack or Viewpoint has what kind of value in a RAW workflow? Is there any other company selling RAW converter licenses around which is ripping off their customers for this kind of “extras”? I don’t know any.
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If nobody has mentioned this yet, I hope they improve the chromatic aberration removal tool, because that feature is trailing behind most other PP software.
PureRAW 4 doesn’t even seem like it applies CA removal on some lens profiles, even when it is selected. I clicked to turn it on or off, and I saw zero changes in the file. Yes, I’ll submit this issue to DxO support.
Edit to add that I would LOVE to see an option to view RAW files in PL7/8, click on one or select multiples and then be able to export them to PureRAW 4 (or successor) with two clicks. Right now I have to click a file in PL7, select “Reveal Image in Finder”, then click on the highlighted file in Finder and select “Open in Pure RAW4”. It can only select one file at a time, so it becomes a longer process than it needs to be. I’m on a MacBook Pro.