DxO Optics

Quick Review What is it? Raw processing software for Windows and Mac - jpeg processing is also supported but you'd miss some of the best features We clicked with: Some excellent lens corrections, Automatic controls work well, Film pack is fun. Shots in the dark: Slow user interface, film pack is extra, pricey if this isn't your living Our quick verdict: Capable of amazing results - so good you might want to use it on all your pictures. Interface will take some getting used to though and your workflow will need adjustment. Design: Features: Ease of Use: Value: Overall: Links: Visit the DxO website

Many owners of digital SLRs or high end bridge or compact cameras find they want to shoot in raw mode to get the best from it. Compared to JPEG output, raw files offer better quality and more latitude for adjustment on the computer. But raw files are correspondingly more awkward to process, needing a workflow to "develop" them into the final image.

DxO Optics Pro aims to fix all that by offering an integrated raw workflow with as much automatic assistance as possible. And for a novel twist, it offers several extras designed to help you get the best not just from the camera, but also from the lens. I tested version 4.1 to see what it had to offer.

The Technology

DxO Optics Pro has heritage in DxO Analyzer - a program to measure lens and camera performance. But where Analyzer determines how the lens performs, Optics Pro uses lens profiles in modules to correct image defects. You only install the modules for equipment you actually have.

Sadly, some lenses don't have a correction module and if you aren't on Canon or Nikon systems, the list of supported camera bodies is small. This is just a reflection on market share, but check the compatible lens and body lists on the DxO website before buying. If your lens isn't supported then you can still use many of the automated features and make manual corrections to the lens geometry. If your camera isn't supported then you may be completely out of luck - we couldn't get the application to open some Olympus .ORF files. Even after converting the .ORF files to Adobe's open "DNG" format DxO didn't want to know.

Editions

Optics Pro is available for Windows and MacOS in three editions. Starter edition, at $79, caters to bridge cameras such as the Fuji S9500 and the Panasonic Lumix FZ30 - and only for JPEG images. The Standard edition, at $149, adds support for raw files from semi-professional DSLRs such as the Canon 30D or Nikon D80. The Elite edition, at $299, picks up the professional end of the market with the Canon 5D and Nikon D2X upwards. We tested the Elite edition on a PC and Intel Mac with, Canon 30D and Nikon D2X files.

All editions can work with JPEG images from other cameras but most of the interesting functionality will be disabled.

The Workflow

Optics Pro can run in three modes, changeable in the Preferences. Automatic mode attempts to intelligently adjust images with best-guess settings, but you'll quickly find the lack of control limiting. Guided mode allows you to choose which adjustments are applied; these then operate much like in Automatic mode. Expert mode give you full access to the options for Optics Pro. And there are a lot of options.

Optics Pro works hard to simplify your life though, with a five-stage workflow. All except the final stage provide a thumbnail strip with the usual star-rating system and a "stack" grouping system.

The first stage is Select. This lets you add files to a project by dragging and dropping them in. There is no direct import from the camera but this is no great loss.

Organise stage help you to pick out your best pictures. It provides a 2, 3 or 4-up view to compare different images, with synchronised zoom on all the displayed pictures. Until you experience the synchronised zoom you'll wonder why you want it - after you try it you'll wonder how you ever did without it when working on more than one image. All programs should implement this.

The Enhance stage is only present in Guided and Expert modes. This allows you to control your edits.

Process stage allows all the changes to be applied and the image rendered as TIFF, JPEG or Adobe DNG (Digital Negative). You can select multiple image targets, so for example you could simultaneously output each image as TIFF for archive, JPEG for shipping to the client and a resized JPEG for putting on a website. It's a minor touch but useful on large projects for clients. It's also a nice touch to output DNG files. Many photographers have their "favourite" raw converter and use another for special occasions. Since DNG is supported you could (if you want) correct the lens distortions in DxO then drop the raw files into Adobe Camera Raw for further raw editing. You can filter the images to be processed by star rating, but sadly can't process an arbitrary selection of your pending images. This can become pretty annoying if you just want to process a couple of your selections and I found myself using the stars to batch pictures rather than for ranking them.

The final stage is View. It provides a different before/after view of your changes. It seems a little redundant but ends the workflow neatly.

Enhancing Pictures

Enhance stage is where you'll spend most of your time though. Optics Pro provides all the standard white balance and cropping controls as well as its camera/lens correction settings. A slightly odd addition is for the EXIF author and copyright information, which feels like it fell out of the Organise stage. And there's no option for IPTC tags sadly.

The image editing functions are largely good though. The DxO Optics controls perform fixes to chromatic aberrations, distortions and vignetting. The vignetting control is particularly impressive as it is based on lens data.

I was staggered to see the image edges change from slightly dark to correctly exposed on a 10-22mm lens without adjusting any parameters. Similarly, the distortion controls are very simple and can even correct for fish-eye effects.

The chromatic aberration (CA) controls are disappointing. CA appears as coloured fringes around objects in areas of high contrast, usually more pronounced towards the edges. Optics Pro has reasonable controls to adjust this, but only lateral CA makes use of lens data. I don't know why this is, but I felt that this should have been another option where I could just turn it on and see the improvement.

The Sharpness controls fair much better. The DxO Lens Softness function will use lens data to correct softness in the image caused by failures in the lens optics. The correction is applied intelligently across the image, so areas where the image is normally softer, such as the edges, are corrected more than the image centre. This isn't a cure for out-of-focus pictures but it does give an image near to your lens' ideal optical performance. You need to be a little careful with this control. Some of the first pictures we opened were shot on a Nikon 50mm 1.4 prime lens. The amount of detail revealed was breathtaking - but a little scary. For portraits you might find yourself using a negative softness.

DxO Noise offers noise reduction tailored to the camera. The results easily match other noise reduction systems without softening the image like other techniques.

DxO Color provides useful colour tuning options. What's novel is the Color Rendition Profiles. If you install the DxO Film Pack (which sadly is an optional extra) you can apply colour profiles that match the intensity and colour response of common slide and print film, such as Kodak Ektachrome and Fuji Velvia. Even the grain can be simulated. It's interesting to play with and should stop film photographers saying you never get colour like Velvia out of a digital image.

The DxO Lighting controls adjust lighting in a picture to ensure better overall exposure. The DxO approach breaks the picture down into light and dark parts and applies as much correction as is needed. (It's similar in concept to Ansel Adams' zone system for determining exposures.) The end result is very good - dark backgrounds gain detail without damaging correctly exposed areas.

The DxO controls are generally very good. If you already have high quality optics and correctly-exposed pictures they lose value, but overall they are still useful enhancements.

Performance and Competition

This extra processing is slow though. Loading raw images can be tedious, and if you are zoomed in on a picture it will reload frequently as you scroll around.

Processing times are also slow. We tested DxO on a moderate powered AMD machine running Windows 2000. One test image took 24 seconds to process to JPEG with all of the options turned off. Canon's own Digital Photo Professional (DPP) software clocked in at 17 seconds. As you add other options, such as noise reduction, lens distortion, lens softness and colour balancing, you rapidly head towards a minute per image. Timing on a Quad 2.66 Intel Mac were about twice as quick. In fairness to Optics Pro, it gives you a lot for your time and it is really all about batch processing - you set parameters for your images then leave it processing. Even so, Optics Pro's power does cost you time.

And it also costs money. Depending on which edition you require, Optics Pro will set you back a good part of the cost of a new lens. And unfortunately for DxO, much of their competition is essentially free. Most manufacturers provide raw processing software with their cameras. If you're a Photoshop user, the recent versions of Photoshop CS already provide raw processing functions, which may be all you need. Even good lens distortion, chromatic aberration and vignette correction is available in the PanoTools plugin for just $15.

Conclusion

So is it worth buying DxO Optics Pro? This depends on how you work and the quality of your lenses.

Optics Pro uniquely combines many functions found elsewhere and allows them to be applied to raw files. It may help you work more efficiently and it'll definitely give you better images. I've become a big fan of the distortion correction and DxO Lighting just because they're so easy. The results can be little short of amazing and once you get your head round the interface you can get great results much faster than in any other application.

But there are issues. The user interface is slow and there's no easy way to reprocess a single image or subset of the images. The DxO FilmPack should really be supplied as standard. And the program has some rough edges - sometimes the zoom position resets and the Preferences window may crash. We actually found that the trial version was less stable than he registered version. Tech support assured us it was the same code but we had several application crashes running the demo on both Mac and PC. The registered version was much more stable and ran without problems on the Mac and with only a couple of issues on the PC. One other "problem" is that the results are so good that you might want to apply them to every image you take with some lenses. That's when you might run into frustrations with the batch times - just remind yourself that it's saving a lot more time than it's taking.

Ask yourself whether you're prepared to work a different way and would like to see how much you can get out of your camera. Then try the DxO Optics Pro demo and see if your camera and lens is supported. You may just be blown away with how much it can do for you.

Myself, I'm putting the money on a replacement lens.