I have both a version 9 elite and a version 11 essentials. I've been comparing them, and as some others have already posted in this thread I don't find the 11 version doing anything which improves image quality which the 9 elite version can't, whereas the elite extras of the 9 do make worthwhile improvements. I'm impressed with how easy it is to get impressive improvements when processing from RAW over my efforts with other free software.
I was particularly keen to check out their auto lens corrections of geometric and chromatic aberrations etc.. I have a wide variety of lenses, some OEM, some third party, and some old film-era lenses. I often use perspective transforms such as making converging verticals parallel, and it's particularly important to correct the geometry of your lens to perfect linearity, removing such things as barrel and pincushion distortion, before making perspective adjustments, otherwise the perspective changes can magnify the geometric aberrations of the lens. I have been using TPLens for this, and been very impressed with how accurate it is, and that it's database of correction data includes every single lens I've got, including the most obscure vintage ones.
DxO's corrections also include automatic correction of chromatic aberration and vignetting, which is a plus point, because those two aspects have be done manually in TPLens. DxO disappoints, however, in not have as large a database of lenses as TPLens. It doesn't have some of my older lenses, and some of my modern but obscure lenses. Even more annoying, for one of my lenses, the Tamron 16-300mm, whose remarkably wide range of focal lengths passes through a variety of different distortions at different focal lengths, it gets the correction badly wrong at 16mm, making it worse rather than better. I don't yet know whether this is a simple bug, such as a number being wrongly signed, or whether it's the result of an insufficiently sophisticated model of lens distortions, such as not doing complex distortions such as mustache, or having insufficient variety over the range of focal lengths.
