DxO PhotoLab 5

Although DxO has been around for quite some time, it's only in the past few years, with the introduction of its PhotoLab raw processor that I've begun to take it seriously.  Its prior offering, Optics Pro, had struck me as poorly designed, lacking in features and confusing to use.  I was taken by surprise then when I discovered PhotoLab 2 while searching for a alternative to Adobe Lightroom.  I found  PhotoLab to be a simple straightforward app that offered everything I needed on an uncluttered interface.  Beyond that, the purchase price for 2.0 was extremely attractive - it came bundled with the then new version 2.0 of NIK filters for only $99.  I subsequently acquired PhotoLab versions 3 and 4 as soon as they became available and thought they were worthwhile upgrades, but it was really the current version 5 - the first that I purchased in the Elite version - that has really amazed me.  It represents a truly astounding advance over the earlier versions and is now in my opinion simply the best raw processor on the market.

PhotoLab 5's most significant advance over previous versions is its new Deep Prime feature, which is also included in DxO's PureRAW, an app designed for those not yet ready to abandon their current RAW processor in favor of another.  The feature combines denoising and demosaicing into a single operation that DxO claims represents a two-stop advance over its previous Prime feature, thus allowing photographers to shoot at high ISO's without having to worry about noise or loss of detail.

Beyond this, DxO has significantly improved features found in older versions of PhotoLab.  Most important of these is the lens correction feature that allows for improvements in an image's sharpness while correcting distortion, chromatic aberration and vignetting.  Meanwhile, the SmartLighting feature is one of the easiest to use tools I've come across to control the dynamic range of an image through the simple use of Selective Tone sliders.  Another slider, labeled ClearView Plus, can be used to control the haze/fog/mist in a given image.  Finally, the ColorWheel won rave reviews in the last version of PhotoLab for the exactitude it achieves in controlling an image's Hue/Saturation/Luminance.   Of more questionable value, to me at least, is the continued presence of the U Point technology that I first encountered in NIK filters and that I feel has been largely superseded by advances in other apps' masking tools.

Photolab 5 also includes new image management tools, most probably to bring it into line with Adobe Lightroom and other such apps, but I personally have never been a big fan of these tools.  One of the reasons I actually liked PhotoLab 2 so much was precisely because there was no image management as such to clutter my workflow.  Nevertheless, such a feature is probably of great use to those switching over from Lightroom catalogs.

For all the reasons given above, PhotoLab 5 has become my default RAW processor and I highly recommend it to those searching for their own alternative to Lightroom.  A free trial is available for those who wish to learn more and take the app for a test drive.