0:00 Fair warning everyone, this is probably going to be quite a long video by my normal standards and that's because I am reviewing DxO PhotoLab 9, an end toend software for photo editing. Now, it has a couple of very specific things that make it particularly interesting. The first one is DxO modules, which are DxO's method of obtaining the best quality from a particular lens and camera combination based on all of the testing that they've done over the years. And also their deep prime function, which is all about removing noise and enhancing detail, which is supposed to be
0:46 excellent. And I really want to see how that works out. So, this all sounds very promising, but is it any good? And maybe as an aside, I'll try and consider whether it's a potential replacement for something like Lightroom. I hope you'll enjoy the video. If you do, and you're new here, don't forget to hit subscribe before you go. Right. First of all, the disclaimer. DxO reached out to me and said, "Would I like to do some reviews on their software?" And I said, "Yes, provided uh I find it relevant." So, in other words, it's something I feel I can review and add some value to. Two, I can
1:34 be honest. And three, I'm not going to get paid for it. I don't even sign up for affiliates. Uh, so basically what that means is I can be completely honest. If you decide to buy this software afterwards, I don't make anything from that. I should also say I'm a long-term Light room and Photoshop user on the subscription model. I don't mind the subscription model. I see the updates coming through, so that doesn't bother me. But I do know there are people who would much prefer to just buy a lifetime license for something and not have to pay ever again. And the good news is with PhotoLab, you can do that. You can buy the software or you buy the license and then you can just use it. Yes, they will come DxO will come out with new versions with with enhanced
2:22 features in the future, but you don't have to buy them if you don't want to. If you do want to buy them, you get a discount because you've already bought the one version of it. You can download a free trial of any of the DXO software. And if you like it, use the code Ralph G15 to get 15% off when you buy it. Another couple of things just to mention quickly. I'm not an expert on PhotoLab. I've only just started to look at it. This is going to be a very quick skim across the surface of what it can do and a few of its features and my initial impressions of it. I do have some other software from uh DxO that I'll be reviewing over the coming months. So, keep watching out for that. When it comes to deep prime, there
3:08 is an option on the system that you will see me using which is grayed out. And that's because it's only for X-Trans sensors uh because it requires a slightly different algorithm I suspect to work for the Fuji X-Tran sensors and I'm using the OM systems so I don't need it. Right, let's jump in. With DxO PhotoLab, you don't actually import images into the software. You just put them in whatever folder on your computer or external hard drive you want and tell PhotoLab where they are. And that's what I've done here. I've just created a folder for this test and I've put three images in there that I'm going to use for this test and this review. You can
3:56 also create collections. So, let's say I had scattered around, you know, a number of different folders on my computer or an external hard drive images all on the same subject. So, maybe I don't know, pictures of egits because I quite like e-grits. Um, I could create a collection that uses all of those um egit pictures no matter where they are and I can go in and edit them and do all the other bits and pieces. Now, I don't want to spend a lot of time on the sort of the cataloging part. Um, I may do that in a future video, but what I wanted to do in this one is focus more on the editing part. And I've picked three images to edit. They are images
4:41 that you may or may not have seen in my previous videos. This first one definitely appeared in one of my videos. It was an early morning shoot uh in a place called Formenta del Sigura and I quite liked the sort of blue hour shot that I got here. This is the original RAW file uh with no editing at all. And uh if I go into the customize module, I have imported this or not imported it because you don't import but I have selected this with um a default preset which I have set up which um doesn't do any changes. It just uh
5:29 applies the optical corrections. Uh, so I could, for example, use a natural style or a standard. I've done the optical corrections. I could have choose to have no corrections, uh, neutral colors or natural colors. Uh, and there's a black and white uh, preset as well. When it comes to black and white, in a future video, you know, in a month or so or couple of months, I'm going to look at the Nick collection because there's supposed to be some really good black and white options in there. But for today, I'm sticking with color. And I am sticking with the uh the optical corrections preset that I've already got. Now, if I look at this image, um it's a bit underexposed, but that's because there were actually some quite bright highlights in here and I
6:15 wanted to preserve those. When it comes to the adjustments in here, there are a number of different tabs that you can go through. There is a a basic tab as well. Um, but the first one you've got basically is the luminance or the light adjustments. So, I can uh bring the exposure up if I want to. I probably wouldn't. Uh, I can bring the highlights down a bit. I can bring the shadows up probably quite a bit because it is quite dark. And I can also bring the midtones up. I quite like that there's a midtone slider because there isn't really a a straightforward midtone slider in Lightroom, but I can bring that up and I can play
7:04 around with the blacks a little bit if I want to just to keep the contrast in there. If I go into this one, I can affect the uh the saturation and the vibrance. So I could add a bit of saturation and add a bit of vibrance if I want to without going too mad. So that's some very basic adjustments. In this tab here, I've got the uh the corrections, noise reduction, etc. So if I go into the 100% view, I mean it's a reasonably clean image. It wasn't shot at high particularly high ISO. Um, but lifting the shadows and that may have
7:50 added a little bit of grain in there. But if I apply the uh deep prime, I'm not seeing any difference at all. And that threw me when I started looking at this, but I figured it out. when you apply the um the deep prime adjustment, the only way to actually see it is to use the little loop view. And then when I put that on, then I can clearly see the difference. Now, I'm sure there's a very good reason for this. probably something to do with processing power and and other things,
8:36 but uh I find it just a little bit awkward to view it this way rather than just being able to view the whole thing, you know, kind of at 100% and see the difference. But the results are excellent. I mean, it's cleaned this up. Didn't need a lot, but it's just it just makes it look nice, but it still looks natural. it doesn't look uh excessively uh sharpened or anything like that. So, I'm going to come out of the loop view and just go back into the normal view. With an image like this, I'm almost certainly going to want to do some uh selective editing. So, in other words, editing just parts of the image. So, if I go into the masking tool, there's a
9:22 number of masking options down here. So, I can add a selection, uh, I can add an area, or I've got the AI options, a predefined mask as they call it here. So, for example, I can pick the sky, and that's handy because that's what I actually want to do. So, I'm going to pick the sky. And we've now got the sky nicely masked. And I can just by doing shift and m, I can display the mask. The other thing I can do if I want to is change it to a black and white overlay, which shows me a much clearer uh picture of what the mask actually looks like. So, what I probably want to do with that sky is maybe just warm it up a fraction
10:09 cuz it looks a bit too blue and a bit too uh over the top. So, I do that a bit. And I can maybe just lift the midtones in it a bit as well. Maybe just drop the blacks down a bit. Not really sure what I want to do with this one, but this is more by way of example than anything else. What I would probably also want to do is select this main building in the middle and just make it stand out a little bit more. So I'm going to create a new mask by clicking the plus key. Click on the AI mask again. And this time I am going to
10:58 look at the selection. So this button down here. If I click on that, as I move the mouse over the image, it shows me what it would select if I click at that point. Now, I want pretty much this whole building. And if I just do that, that is pretty much exactly what I want. So, if I click on that, I've got a mask there. And on this one, I am going to bring the saturation up on that building and the vibrance up.
11:44 Maybe bring the midtones up a bit. Drop the blacks down a bit just to make it stand out a bit more. And what I might want to do is select the the other two buildings here. So, I'm going to create a new mask of the same type. Select that building. And on that one, I'm just going to bring the midtonones and the exposure down a bit. And then I'm going to create another new mask.
12:33 Another area. Select that building and bring the midtones down and the exposure down. And then I could put in a simple mask along the bottom. I think that is a linear gradient. Just draw that up. And I'm going to just drop the exposure down in that foreground a little bit like that. So that's just an idea of some of the basic editing. Now there's a few other things that I might want to do with an image. So for example, I might want to remove some of these cables that are sitting up here. Or
13:18 maybe I just want to get rid of some dust spots. Well, the good news is there is a healing tool. It's a pretty straightforward healing tool. It doesn't have any of the sort of fancy AI bells and whistles that you get in some tools, but if I just paint that in, it does take a few seconds to actually apply the effect. And that may just be some delay on my computer, but you can see it's got rid of that quite nicely. If you were going to do complicated object removal, you would almost certainly want something with a bit more um
14:04 uh content aware than this perhaps has got. But for just basic removal of things, it's fine. The only thing I will say is I haven't found a way to draw a straight line. So, I'm used to with the Adobe stuff, you can hold the shift key down and click one end of a line and another and you get a straight line. That doesn't seem to work with this. But, yeah, I can remove all of these if I want to. I'm not going to go through and do all of them because it's it's not really necessary in here. Now, the other thing I might want to do because this is a wide angle image is I might want to um straighten it up a little bit. And there is a option here that I can go into for doing optical corrections. And I will say there is another product
14:51 um available which I will be reviewing in a future one which is called Viewpoint which is supposed to be really good at doing uh you know adjusting the angles in things but that's for a future video. Uh, for this one, I just want to kind of straighten it up a little bit so that this building in the middle looks square. Obviously, I'm going to lose some of the image doing that, but that's true with any of these. So, I've now got two lines. I'm going to drag that line across and then just angle it across so that it matches up roughly with that. And drag that one across and angle it so that it matches up roughly with that. Then I'm going to click apply.
15:42 And and you can see how much it's uh affected the the size of the image at the bottom. But as I said, that's to be expected. So now I can go into the uh the crop tool. And now I've got an image that fits. And I wanted to get rid of some of those buildings on the side a bit more. Anyway, and then I think I'd probably play around just a little bit more. Maybe with a bit more on the midtones, bit more on the shadows perhaps, and maybe a bit more vibrance. Like I say, I'm only really showing you what it can do. So, it's possible that
16:30 uh with a bit more time I would do a better job on this. Okay, this second image I just really wanted to show you uh one of the other masking options here. [snorts] And what we've actually got here is uh quite a nice picture that I took of an e-grit. It was on a windy day and it was kind of fluffing its feathers up. Uh, and it looks quite nice, but it could do with a little bit of selective processing just to make the e-grit stand out a little bit more. So all I'm going to do with this image uh again this is
17:15 the uh the standard import if you like or the standard way of displaying it uh with only the optical corrections done. So I'm just going to tweak it very slightly. Going to bring the highlights down a bit. Maybe lift the midtones and the shadows a bit. Bring the blacks down just a tiny bit. And I'm going to add just a little bit of vibrance and maybe a very tiny fraction of saturation. When it comes to sharpness on this, I'm just going to use the the loop view. And you know, in all
18:01 honesty, just the basic looks pretty much all it needs. Um, if I hit the deep prime, it kind of doesn't make any difference. I just I think just because it doesn't need anything else doing to it. So, it's intelligent enough not to do something that doesn't need anything doing to it. And I think that's pretty good. So, what I wanted to do on this is do some a little bit of selective editing uh to make the egret just stand out a little bit more. So, I'm going to click on the masking and click on the AI masking again. And then I'm going to come down to my
18:47 selection here. Now, there's things here sky subject background people animals, and immediately I hover over animals and it's showing a pretty good mask around the egret. Subject would probably also work. background is doing a nice job of showing the background. So, I'm going to start with the background. I'm going to click on that. And I'm just going to pull the exposure down just a fraction. And likewise on the mid tones. And I'm going to reduce the vibrance and the saturation of the background a little bit. Then I'm going to
19:34 go in here. I'm going to create a brand new mask. Only this time I'm going to select animals. So it's now selected the e-grit. On the e-grit itself, I'm going to lift the midtones a little bit. Maybe just drop the highlights back a fraction. Pull back the blacks a bit. and boost the saturation and vibrance just a fraction more. Keeping it very subtle. Don't want to do too much on this. And that is pretty much it for that image. But I just wanted to show you that um animal and background selection
20:20 option on here. Uh, I'm going to be doing another animal image in a moment, but I do know that that one actually shows up something a little bit odd. So, we'll come on to that one right now because the next image we're doing is this one. This was from a shoot I did of some squirrels running around. They were in the shade beneath some trees. It was a bright sunny day, but they were deep in the shadows. And this one, I didn't really like it because it was underexposed too much. It was just too dark. Now, if I again, this has only had the um uh uh the optical corrections applied, nothing else. But if I go in
21:05 and look at the kind of the loop view on this, even though it's not a massively high ISO, I think it's something like 4,000. Um, it still looks a bit grainy and noisy and a bit soft because it's underexposed. And if I try to recover this by bringing up the shadows and highlights, that noise is only going to get worse. So, we'll do that. Let's go in here. I'm going to bring the shadows up quite a bit. Bring the mid tones up a bit. Maybe drop the blacks just a fraction. And then we need to put in some vibrance
21:51 and saturation. I may go a little bit overboard on this just for the purposes of this example. Okay. Now let's have a look at the loop view. And now we can see, yeah, it looks pretty unpleasant. It's grainy and soft. But what happens if I go into the detail and switch on the deep prime option that has actually done a very good job. Now this was an unusable image before. I don't think I used it in the video at all. Um, and I've certainly never done anything with it. But looking at this
22:36 now, I would say that is a usable image. Loop view off. What else are we going to do to this image? Well, I think I'd like to do a little bit to make the the squirrel pop just a little bit more. So, I'm going to go into the masks, create a new mask, pick the AI mask, and then I'm going to do the animal selection, and it can't find it. Now, either it doesn't know that a squirrel is an animal, which I doubt, um, or it's something to do with the fact that the background and the squirrel have got some very similar colors and tones. There's maybe just not enough to differentiate it. But if I pick uh and add an area
23:25 and I can just draw a box kind of over the squirrel. And look at that. [snorts] That's done actually a pretty good of selecting it. It's got a few bits nearby that I don't really want, but it's done a pretty good job of selecting the squirrel. So, what I'm going to do, I'm going to take uh I'm going to add a submask. This little box here, add a sub mask. And for that submask, I'm going to pick a brush. And I'm going to set it to a negative setting. And I'm just going to brush out a couple of bits that I don't want affected here and here. And here. Just like that. Now, I have taken a bit off of the squirrel's ear. So, I'm just going to click a positive brush.
24:14 Uh, make it a fraction smaller. and just brush that ear back in. I could use a um a more automatic brush that uh defines the edges better, but I don't really need to for this. So, all I'm going to do with the squirrel now is actually bring the midtones up a bit further, backs down a bit more, and I'm going to put a touch more vibrance and saturation in. Actually, you know, I'm going to put the blacks back there and lift the shadows a bit more. Not too much. Too much. The little bit of a delay makes it a bit awkward sometimes. And then what I really want to do is select the background.
25:00 So if I create a new mask now because it wouldn't detect um the background properly the uh sorry the animal properly before I suspect it also won't select the background. No it won't. So actually the best thing I can do if I undo that. If I take that mask and duplicate it, now I've got exactly the same mask. And you can see it's duplicating the effect as well. But I can reset that. [snorts] And if I click this button here, it will invert it. So it's now affecting the background, but obviously not affecting the bits that I brushed out. So I'll put a new uh sub mask in with a brush. Make sure
25:49 it's set to add Make it a bit bigger. And just add it back in like that. And there. And [clears throat] there. Maybe take out a bit of that cone cuz it looks a bit wrong. And then on that I am going to just bring the exposure down a fraction on the background. Too far. Bring the midtones down a bit. And maybe drop the vibrance and saturation a bit. Now, to be honest,
26:36 this image probably needs a bit of cleaning up still. There's a lot of rubbish in here that I would probably want to go in with maybe a decent clone tool and get rid of. I mean, I could try and take some bits out uh kind of with that. I mean, it will take out the simple stuff, but I might want to take out some more complicated stuff, but it could actually end up being a nice image with a little bit more work done, which I may do. But the other thing I'd probably want to do with this image is crop it. So I'm going to go in and crop it down to a 16 by9.
27:25 Now I might spend a little bit of time separate to this video just taking out some of those uh unpleasant bits and pieces just to make the image look cleaner and nicer cuz it's actually quite a cute little shot. I did do some more work on this. I did it all in PhotoLab. So, I removed a number of items in PhotoLab just to try to make the image look a little bit better. [snorts] The clone tool, the healing tool in PhotoLab is fine for just normal stuff, but if you want to do a lot of uh [clears throat] removing things or complicated removals or content aware type removals, it doesn't appear based on what I've seen so far that it's an ideal tool for that. All of the files in PhotoLab, of course,
28:14 can be exported. You can export them as JPEGs. You can export them as TIFF files. You can export them as RAW files if you want to take them out and put them into another RAW editor like Lightroom for example. What are my impressions of PhotoLab? it's ability to do tonal changes, vibrance, saturation, uh selective um adjustments by, you know, selecting the subject, selecting the background, selecting parts of the scene. That all works very very well. It's comparable to other tools that I've used. I've only scratched the surface of the selection, the mask selections that are available. There's a number of others in there that I haven't had a chance to play around
28:59 with yet. Um, so, you know, I may not have done justice to that, but certainly all of that works very very well. the uh DxO modules, which pulls the best out of the image, uh does seem to be very good. And Deep Prime does a fantastic job of cleaning the image up and making it look sharp, dinoised, but without looking like it's been excessively sharpened or excessively dinoised. So, it does a really, really nice job. I've only kind of used the default settings in this video, but of course you can play around with that and in future ones I might do. Is it a replacement for Adobe Lightroom?
29:44 It depends on what you want to do in Lightroom. Couple of things that are missing in here uh compared to Lightroom are the ability to do HDR merge and panorama merge. So, if you do a lot of those and you do them in Lightroom, it's probably not going to be a direct replacement because you'd need some other software to do that. Likewise, as I've already mentioned, the kind of the removal tools, cloning tools are nowhere near as sophisticated. However, I do think the sharpening, noise reduction, the like the things that affect the image quality are significantly better in PhotoLab than anything I've seen in Adobe Lightroom. Another thing to consider is that if you
30:31 have a significant catalog already in Adobe Lightroom, the chances are it's going to be a lot of work. If you decide to get rid of Lightroom and move everything over to PhotoLab, there's no direct migration and uh they actually work in different ways in terms of the way they um store the information about the images. So, if you're a long-term Lightroom user, you may want to think twice about swapping over to PhotoLab. However, there's some good news there because there is another piece of software which I will be reviewing fairly [snorts] soon and that is Pure Raw. Now, Pure Raw has all of the advantages apparently of the
31:19 sharpening, denoising, image quality stuff, but without all the rest of it. So, you use it to pre-process your RAW files to create new RAW files that you then put into Lightroom or another tool to do the rest of the editing. So, I'll be reviewing that at another point. So, over the coming months, I'll be doing more with the DxO software. I already mentioned a few that I'm going to do. I'm not going to do them too frequently, [snorts] but over the next few months, I'll be talking about them quite a lot. And I'd like to thank DxO for giving me this opportunity. I'd like to thank you for watching. I hope you've enjoyed this little view. I hope the video hasn't run too long. [gasps] If you've enjoyed
32:06 this, please give it a like and leave me a comment. Let me know what you think. If you've enjoyed this video and you're new here, don't forget to hit subscribe before you go. Thanks again for watching and until the next video. Bye.
