Beginner DXO, any good please?

LouiseTopp

LouiseTopp

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I'm thinking of getting DXO because I can't afford the £8 you pay for Light room once a month, I heard you pay yearly with DXO and only pay for the fancy add on's if you want them. But what it comes with should be just enought for me.

Has anyone used this software please?
 
I use both.

DXO Optics Pro is a one-off purchase. £99 for the "Essentials" version. £159 for the "Elite" version. The main difference is that the Elite version has DXO's (very good) PRIME noise reduction, which (only) works on raw files.

DXO is a one-off purchase until you change your camera. You may then have to buy a new version of DXO at that point, and that can be expensive, somewhere around £60 to £70 has far as I recall but that was to upgrade the Elite version that I use. Presumably an Essentials upgrade is less.

Lightroom 6 is a one-off purchase of £99. If you change your camera and you shoot raw you may need to upgrade Lightroom, although unlike with DXO there is a (free) workaround you can use. The upgrade costs a similar amount as with DXO I think. (I have upgraded both, but I'd need to dig around in my paperwork to find out what I paid.)

If you are strapped for cash, what other options have you looked at? There are some free options and some less expensive options.

For example, Photoshop Elements 14 (which I have) is a one-off cost of £67. It has lots of functionality and three interfaces, two of which are very suitable for beginners, and because it has loads of functionality you can "expand into it" over time. Elements 15 is £79. I haven't yet looked at it so I don't know what extra it provides over Elements 14.

An example of a free product which has editing facilities is Faststone Image Viewer (which I use, but not for editing).
 
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You do pay yearly and you obviously don't have to upgrade each year. The Essentials offering (the cheapest) is £99 direct from DxO, which isn't much different to getting Light Room AND Photoshop on CC (subscription) which will always be up to date. Still, it is whatever you feel most comfortable with when spending your hard earned :)

I've used previous versions of DxO (to version 10) and generally it is pretty good. I'd go so far as to say it has the best noise reduction tech I've used. It isn't as flexible as Light Room though imo/e and it's cataloging abilities are no where near as good as Light Room. It isn't as powerful as PS either.
 
PaulButler said:
I've used previous versions of DxO (to version 10) and generally it is pretty good. I'd go so far as to say it has the best noise reduction tech I've used.
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I feel the same. But I shoot raw. Is it that much of an improvement over others for JPEG? (Honest question. I don't know.)

PaulButler said:
It isn't as flexible as Light Room though imo/e and it's cataloging abilities are no where near as good as Light Room. It isn't as powerful as PS either.
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Absolutely.

Like Lightroom, Elements also has cataloging facilities that DXO doesn't.

DXO doesn't let you do any local adjustments, and in this respect is IMO hugely inferior to Lightroom, Photoshop and Elements.

There are some significant global adjustments that DXO doesn't do either, like perspective adjustments, for which you need to purchase for an additional £60 to get facilities that are included with Lightroom and Elements. Viewpoint might do more, I don't know, but Lightroom and Elements do the basics like vertical and horizontal perspective correction and barrel and pincushion distortion correction.

And unfortunately for some cameras - including my Panasonic bridge cameras - DXO produces different (and incorrect) geometry and different cropping (including nasty vignetting) for some (wide angle) raw files compared to out of the camera JPEGs. On the other hand Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw (and hence also Elements, which uses ACR for raw files) produce exactly the same geometry and cropping as in the out of the camera JPEGs.

Also, although DXO will write DNG files it won't read them, so you can't use the workaround of producing DNG files using Adobe DNG Converter if your new camera isn't supported, a workaround which you can use with Lightroom, Photoshop and Elements.

My feeling is that DXO isn't a good buy as the sole editing software for a beginner.
 
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GardenersHelper said:
I feel the same. But I shoot raw. Is it that much of an improvement over others for JPEG? (Honest question. I don't know.)
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I have/had (rarely use it now tbh) the elite version so it works on raw files, but even on jpegs I'd say it was still better. Trouble is there are so many NR progs and plug ins it is difficult to know which is "best".
 
PaulButler said:
I have/had (rarely use it now tbh) the elite version so it works on raw files, but even on jpegs I'd say it was still better.
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Thanks.

PaulButler said:
Trouble is there are so many NR progs and plug ins it is difficult to know which is "best".
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Very true. Just yesterday and today as it happens I've being doing an exercise on just that, looking at several options. But even in controlled trials I'm finding it surprisingly difficult to work out what is best. It isn't a simple question, it seems to me.
 
LouiseTopp said:
What, like sharpening, denoising and brightening up etc?
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You can do all of those in DXO, but only for the whole image. You can't select an area of the image and adjust the sharpening, denoising, brightening etc in just that area. You can do that in Lightroom, Elements and Photoshop.
 
GardenersHelper said:
You can do all of those in DXO, but only for the whole image. You can't select an area of the image and adjust the sharpening, denoising, brightening etc in just that area. You can do that in Lightroom, Elements and Photoshop.
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You may be wondering why you would want to do local adjustments on just part of an image. Here are a couple of examples.

Suppose you had an image like this. It was a high contrast scene and was exposed to protect the highlights. This made the background dark. This is not an artificial example by the way. I expose like this quite a lot.)


Local adjustment 1 by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

I then wanted to see more of what was in the background, so I brightened up the shadows, to give the effect shown in the bottom image below.


Local adjustment 2 by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

Brightening up dark areas can make them noisy, so I might want to apply noise reduction. I wouldn't want to apply the noise reduction to the flower because noise reduction smooths out details, and I want to keep the details in the flower. So I would select the background and just apply noise reduction to the background. The selected area is shown in red on the image, and what I have done to it ("Noise 100") is shown in the block at the top right.


Local adjustment 3 by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

Here is another example. Suppose I had an image like this, with a detailed subject against a plain background.


Local adjustment 4 by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

I like to sharpen a lot to bring out the fine detail in images like this. However, if I applied really strong sharpening to the whole image it could make the background look bad (especially if I had brightened up the background like in the previous example so it was already a bit noisy). So I might apply the sharpening only to the areas that have detail in them. Lightroom lets me do this by applying a mask to the image. Only the areas shown in white will be sharpened, so I won't do any damage to the smooth background.


Local adjustment 5 by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
 
Although you are asking about a specific editing package have you considered the free editors. One - Faststone - has been mentioned already and there are many others - http://www.techradar.com/news/softw...e-10-top-image-editors-you-should-try-1135489

The drawback to the free editors I know is not in their editing abilities it is because they do not have a cataloguing or organising facility.

I use Photshop Elements 11 because I find it does most that I want to do in editing my photos (though I also use GIMP too) but its organising abilities is equally important to me.

Dave
 
I use DxO. After testing all the others, I found it produces by far the best image, with far less work.
I also use Paint Shop Pro for the occassional fine adjustment work.
Mike
 
Can you remove unwanted objects in DXO?
 
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LouiseTopp said:
Can you remove unwanted objects in DXO?
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No. DXO is global adjustments only.

I used DXO at version 6 I think and never bothered to upgrade and haven't used it for years now. I've trialled some of their new versions but find it very limiting compared to LR. Sure it is very good at certain things but not enough to warrant the cost.

If you don't want to spend the monthly fee for LR, why not just buy LR 6?
 
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ecoleman said:
LR 6 is a one off payment you will get patches and bug fixes but not feature updates like you do with LR CC. Of course when LR 7 comes out you will have to pay for an upgrade but that's entirely up to you.
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Indeed so, it's up to you if you upgrade or not. As long as you are content with the facilities of LR6 you can carry on using it after LR7, LR8 etc are released. (Actually, some people wonder if there will ever be an LR7, or whether Adobe will simply carry on with upgrading LR CC and let LR standalone die.)

Assuming they do move to LR7, once it is released LR6 won't get patches for new cameras' raw files. But even if you do get a new camera which isn't supported by LR7 you can carry on using LR6 by using the (free) Adobe DNG converter to convert your new camera's raw files to DNG format, which LR6 can read.
 
If you have a spare old pc lying around then you could always install Linux for free (mint 18 is just out) and something like Darktable (also free) which will cover all the basic (and a lot of advanced stuff) RAW edits (local and global).

For slightly more advanced work you then turn to Gimp (free) and the numerous plugins like Resynthesise (again free).
 
I couldn't get on with Gimp as it was very complicated to get used to

Is Light room 7 a one off payment as well?
 
LR7 doesn't exist (yet ... who knows if it ever will?). LR 6 is the last stand alone version that is currently available - i.e. for a one off payment.
 
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