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SOFTWARE: DxO Optics Pro
Tutorials and Reviews
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DxO Optics Pro
Review by DavidTO.
DxO Optics Pro v3.5 is many things at once. You can improve the quality of any image with it (JPEG or RAW), convert from RAW to JPEG, TIFF, or DNG. What's unique about DxO is that they have profiled cameras and lenses in such a way that just by reading your EXIF information the application can optimize your image, because it knows what to do with x camera with y lens at z settings. It's pretty amazing.
You can use the application in any of three modes: Fully Automatic, Key Controls or Expert Controls.
Here you see the window for Fully Automatic, with one shot in it. What you can do here is REALLY basic, and this view is really here for you to collect the shots you want to batch, and then start the batch. That's it.
CAVEAT: I will be using only full automatic settings in both Camera Raw and DxO. I won't be optimizing the output of either. This may not be fair, since many of you would never accept automatic settings from Photoshop. Well, you just might in DxO, and that's what we're going to compare. Auto to auto.
Here are the settings you have available in "Key Controls" mode. Here you have pretty much everything that you're probably used to having in a RAW converter.
The next several images show the options available in Expert Controls. Here is Color and Exposure.
DxO Optics.
DxO Lighting.
DxO Noise.
Sharpening.
Image Information.
Output Settings.
This is the preferences window. I'm not going to go through all of them, but here is the Output Settings for JPEG.
And the output settings for DNG.
This is the batch window. You can see that it's estimating a very long time. This is not accurate, thankfully. On my older 1ghz Powerbook it was pretty slow. Of course it's much faster on the newer systems.
But you don't have to worry about any of that stuff. I processed the image in the Fully Automatic mode.
And here's the result. This is an animated GIF of auto output from Dxo and Photoshop Camera Raw. Both were fully auto.
And this is a 100% crop of the above image.
Here's another sample, this one shot wide, with my Canon 10-22EFS lens at 10mm and f8.
100% crop.
100% crop.
What's going on here, in very basic terms is that DxO has generated profiles for every camera/lens combination. These profiles tell the application exactly how to optimize for distortion, noise and chromatic abberation. In addition, the application has sophisticated algorithms to deal with lighting. All this combines to provide exceptional output. Thinking about upgrading to "L" glass? Maybe your money is better spent here--you may just get more bang for your buck as far as increasing the quality of your shots.
None of the images in this review were processed beyond the RAW processing of ACR and DxO. In both cases the color temp was set to "as shot" and all other settings were automatic.
Maybe it's not fair to pit PS's auto settings against DxO, but that's what I did. What do you think?
If you want to see how someone who knows what they're doing can do with DxO, take a look at the DxO Masters page. What you'll see in each image is the before--just pass your mouse over the image to see the after. Pretty slick.
Review by DavidTO.
DxO Optics Pro v3.5 is many things at once. You can improve the quality of any image with it (JPEG or RAW), convert from RAW to JPEG, TIFF, or DNG. What's unique about DxO is that they have profiled cameras and lenses in such a way that just by reading your EXIF information the application can optimize your image, because it knows what to do with x camera with y lens at z settings. It's pretty amazing.
You can use the application in any of three modes: Fully Automatic, Key Controls or Expert Controls.
Here you see the window for Fully Automatic, with one shot in it. What you can do here is REALLY basic, and this view is really here for you to collect the shots you want to batch, and then start the batch. That's it.
CAVEAT: I will be using only full automatic settings in both Camera Raw and DxO. I won't be optimizing the output of either. This may not be fair, since many of you would never accept automatic settings from Photoshop. Well, you just might in DxO, and that's what we're going to compare. Auto to auto.
Here are the settings you have available in "Key Controls" mode. Here you have pretty much everything that you're probably used to having in a RAW converter.
The next several images show the options available in Expert Controls. Here is Color and Exposure.
DxO Optics.
DxO Lighting.
DxO Noise.
Sharpening.
Image Information.
Output Settings.
This is the preferences window. I'm not going to go through all of them, but here is the Output Settings for JPEG.
And the output settings for DNG.
This is the batch window. You can see that it's estimating a very long time. This is not accurate, thankfully. On my older 1ghz Powerbook it was pretty slow. Of course it's much faster on the newer systems.
But you don't have to worry about any of that stuff. I processed the image in the Fully Automatic mode.
And here's the result. This is an animated GIF of auto output from Dxo and Photoshop Camera Raw. Both were fully auto.
And this is a 100% crop of the above image.
Here's another sample, this one shot wide, with my Canon 10-22EFS lens at 10mm and f8.
100% crop.
100% crop.
What's going on here, in very basic terms is that DxO has generated profiles for every camera/lens combination. These profiles tell the application exactly how to optimize for distortion, noise and chromatic abberation. In addition, the application has sophisticated algorithms to deal with lighting. All this combines to provide exceptional output. Thinking about upgrading to "L" glass? Maybe your money is better spent here--you may just get more bang for your buck as far as increasing the quality of your shots.
None of the images in this review were processed beyond the RAW processing of ACR and DxO. In both cases the color temp was set to "as shot" and all other settings were automatic.
Maybe it's not fair to pit PS's auto settings against DxO, but that's what I did. What do you think?
If you want to see how someone who knows what they're doing can do with DxO, take a look at the DxO Masters page. What you'll see in each image is the before--just pass your mouse over the image to see the after. Pretty slick.
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