I decided to start a new thread as my previous one has got somewhat bogged down by my pursuit of library issues. However, my main driver is processing. A kind person here recommended I try DXO Photolab 4 Elite and so I have spent about 7 hours fiddling with a trial version and reading reviews.
The reviews generally say that DXO is in a different league to Lightroom for rendering etc. To rehash a bit: I have about 12 years experience with Photoshop and Lightroom, as part of Creative Cloud in latter years, but I stopped using it last July when I sold a business. In reality almost all use was delegated to a graphic designer who produced our web images and brochures using InDesign etc, but I was very familiar with processing my own images. As per the other thread I don't like the adobe subscription model. I am no longer running an up to date version of Adobe software so comparisons are difficult. I also trialled Luminar AI and found it unsatisfactory.
DXO Photolab 4 first thoughts
- Only useful for RAW processing as the best features require that. My wife will not be pleased.
- Colour rendering can be selected by camera body. This is a good idea.
- Lens correction is very good (Raw only). We use good L glass pretty much exclusively (apart from one 50mm and a compact travel long zoom green ring lens) and all of the lens profiles are set up)
- I really like the super easy watermarking which can use logos and text and be batch applied
- Batch renaming is very handy and helps address some of my library issues, though so far in my trial I have just been playing with individual images mainly
- Batch processing seems to give a great deal of choice on customising - for example you can elect not to apply it to a certain lens (such as our f1.2L 85mm). I like that feature.
- Noise reduction has completely shocked me. There is a thing called "deep Prime" which seems to fish details out of the depths and make them visible. I have never seen anything come close to this.
I am still attempting to establish if I can be mean and use my very old version of DXO as an upgrade path. But The Elite version otherwise (which is needed to get the noise reduction and some other gadgets) is £179 less a £10 discount code, and runs on three machines. The standard version is £115 but all the stuff I like with batch processing only seems to be available in the Elite one.
I will now move on and have a look at library functionality, but if necessary I will use different software for that if I can preserve all the batch id's and EXIF data.
Adrian