DxO PureRAW Released

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jsachs
Posts: 4203
Joined: January 22nd, 2009, 11:03 pm

DxO PureRAW Released

Post by jsachs »

DxO recently released a less expensive version of its DxO PhotoLab raw file processing package called DxO PureRAW. It strips out all the image editing features and sliders, retaining only raw conversion, lens correction and noise reduction. It is currently available for $90 (a 30% discount). Since most of the other PhotoLab features are duplications of similar functions in Picture Window, this could be an attractive option as their lens correction and noise reduction are excellent. The one major shortcoming of DxO is the lack of support for Fuji X-Trans sensors, so caveat emptor.

For more info, see the DxO web site: https://shop.dxo.com/en/
Jonathan Sachs
Digital Light & Color
Charles2
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What is the make/model of your primary camera?: Fuji X-Pro 2
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Re: DxO PureRAW Released

Post by Charles2 »

The advertising page for the product and the photos there imply that the program applies the same tone curve and saturation settings as DxO PhotoLab. Even the latter's "no correction" preset seems to do stuff.

If you like that style, great. If you want to start with less of it, Raw Therapee has very good noise reduction. It also has lens correction transformations, but you have to work out the parameters for your lens by trial and error.
jsachs
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Re: DxO PureRAW Released

Post by jsachs »

Every raw converter necessarily does gamma correction and also applies some kind of S-shaped curve to the raw data which otherwise would look horrible. In any case the result is just a starting point for further adjustment to taste. The color can be controlled by selecting a good camera profile. I have not actually tried DxO PureRaw so I don't know exactly which features of PhotoLab is has and which were left out.

Raw Therapee is free and also works quite well, but in my opinion its user interface is not as polished and it is not as good at lens correction and noise reduction. The new noise reduction in DxO Photolab is similar to Topaz Denoise AI and quite amazing.
Jonathan Sachs
Digital Light & Color
tonygamble
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Re: DxO PureRAW Released

Post by tonygamble »

I've been using DxO for well over a year once I realised that Qimage was losing interest in RAW converting. I'd been using it for ages but it became pretty clear that nobody wanted to use it for bulk converting. Mike and his akolites were folk who would spend the best part of an hour working on an image when I wanted my hour to process a hundred.

It was a chance remark from Jonathan that encouraged me to take a look and lucky timing.

I find that for most of my pictures it does a good job. I still revert to PWP for the tricky ones but the full version of DxO is, for me anyway, still good value for money - especially for folk like me who often come home with a hundred images I want to process and post on my web site without it taking a day.

I have yet to move to PWP 8 but remain interested in your chats. Maybe I will swop sometime soon.

Tony
London UK
HanSch
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Re: DxO PureRAW Released

Post by HanSch »

I use DxO Photolab 4, and the option "export to DNG" is similar to the output of Pure RAW.
As Jonathan commented, the optical corrections and the noise reduction are excellent. The exported DNG files are large, since they are linear RAW files.
I use the "export to DNG" option once in a while to process the resulting RAW file in PWP 7, because PWP 7 develops the RAW file in HSV color space. This way, bright colors with low saturation (e.g. sky) will be preserved better than in RGB, where they go to white and lose the hue.
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