DxO PhotoLab 2 review

DxO PhotoLab 2 (Elite Edition) £159 (currently on offer at £119.99)
DxO PhotoLab 2 (Essential Edition) £99 (currently on offer at £79.99)
https://www.dxo.com/dxo-photolab/

DxO PhotoLab 2 is an image processing packaged aimed specifically at photographers. If you’ve taken a photograph and the colours, sharpness or exposure are not quite what you want, this software will help you enhance the image to achieve a more satisfactory, pleasing or dramatic effect.

Here I am using DxO PhotoLab 2 to process the original image (seen in the top half of the screen) by setting parameters to improve the contrast, colour saturation and brightness. The processed image is shown in the bottom half of the screen

There is more to creating a great photo than just clicking the button on your camera and saving the results onto disk. Once you have the image, there are all kinds of ways you can process it in order to make it really stand out. And that’s where DxO PhotoLab comes in. It is an image processing program which specialises in enhancing and correcting images, with some features specifically tailored for RAW (unprocessed) images.

RAW images contain more information than images saved in formats such JPG or PNG. Some of that information is lost when it is processed into one of those formats. DxO PhotoLab, however, is able to use the information stored in RAW file in order to optimise the image rendering – for example, by correcting optical flaws, or correcting colour balance and sharpness. While RAW processing is its strength, it can also work with other image formats such as JPEG, though the range of optimisations is more limited with those formats.

The software has built-in support for a number of cameras from major manufacturers such as Canon, Panasonic, Nikon, Olympus, Apple, Sony and others. This helps the software to automate the processing of RAW images from specific makes and model of camera. The company claims that it has analysed no less than 42,000 camera/lens combinations to help to automate the enhancement of camera-specific images. You and can find the full list of supported cameras here:  https://www.dxo.com/dxo-photolab/supported-cameras/

If grainy pictures are a problem, its denoising tools could be a big advantage. Grain is likely to be most problematic in shots taken in low light with high ISO. So if night-time shooting is important to you, denoising could help to add sharpness to your photos. Some of the more advanced features are only available in the Elite Edition. The cheaper Essential edition has the core functionality but lacks dedicated camera support, enhanced denoise and a few other image processing tools. I have been using the Elite edition for this review. You can check the feature lists for both editions here: https://shop.dxo.com/en/photo-software/dxo-photolab

Here I have selected an area (the area above the diagonal line which I have simply drawn and rotated on the image) and I am making local edits by dragging the ‘bar chart’ elements to alter colour, contrast, grain, shadows and black density.

PhotoLab 2 includes an automatic repair tool to remove unwanted elements – everything from a bit of dust to a bird in the sky – with a selective retouching tool to mask and replace areas of the image. The main new feature in the latest release of PhotoLab is a tool to let you may make ‘local adjustments’ – that is, you can selected areas of a photograph and apply edits to them. You can, for example, select the sky and then make in-place changes to its colour and contrast.

DxO PhotoLab 2 also has a PhotoLibrary tool for organising your pictures. This provides the ability to search through directories of images in order to find those that match specific criteria such as date, ISO setting or focal length. This is a feature that is broadly similar (though not quite yet as complete) as the tools provided by Lightroom Classic.

If you don’t want to go to the bother of tweaking individual parameters, you can simply apply one of the ‘presets’ to apply a range of effects and enhancements at the click of a mouse button.

PhotoLab 2 comes with arrange of ready-to-use filters and ‘image fixes’ which can be simply applied to photos. However, to get the most from the software you may need to tweak individual parameters which are available in a set of collapsible panels to let you make adjustments to lighting, colour and geometry. This can be quite a detailed and complex process. This is great for professional users who are prepared to put in the time and effort to learn to use all the tools and options. For amateur or occasional users, however, this may seem intimidatingly complicated. Indeed, for those users a simpler-to-use (and cheaper) program such as Smart Photo Editor might be more appropriate.  For a guide to the principal features of DxO PhotoLab 2 see here: https://www.dxo.com/dxo-photolab/features/

The bottom line: who needs this software? If you want to apply effects and corrections to your photographs, a general-purpose image editing program such as Adobe PhotoShop may be your first choice. Alternatively, if you need a cheaper solution, a program such as Affinity Photo or CyberLink PhotoDirector might fit the bill. For image processing features aimed specifically at photographic enhancement, the obvious competitors to PhotoLab are Adobe LightRoom and Phase One’s Capture One.

Dx0 PhotoLab is aimed at professional photographers who need to make adjustments at the nitty-gritty level of detail. For those users, it provides a solid range of features with dedicated camera support at what, in this range of software, is quite a reasonable price. In short DxO PhotoLab 2 is a good value image processing program for the more serious photographer.