DXO Photolab 5 - An editing alternative to Lightroom

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Hi folks. Lightroom has an awesome catalog system for managing your digital photographic assets, but there remain a lot of folks who don’t use the catalog for their own reasons and since the catalog is easily half the value proposition of Lightroom perhaps an alternative might make sense. Moreover, many customers of the Adobe Photographer’s bundle which is about $17 per month CAD rarely if ever go into Photoshop.

So if you don’t use Lightroom’s catalog and you don’t use Photoshop’s advanced functions, is there another option?

I think that there is and it’s called DXO Photolab. The release version at time of writing is version 5. It has no catalog. It’s an editor, pure and simple. It is however a massively powerful editor and some features such as Clearview have no alternative in other products. If you can use the Lightroom style of editing you can use DXO Photolab. It’s not a subscription, it is a perpetual license product so you pay for it once and use it for as long as you wish, upgrading to the next release only if it makes sense to you.

DXO is quite diligent about updates and you will receive them reasonably frequently but not so often as to have them become a burden. DXO is the same company that offers the popular plugin suite called the Nik Collection and the two are well integrated if you are so inclined.

There are unique functions in DXO Photolab that make it, in my opinion, a better one time purchase than many of the alternatives.

  • Clearview - Is the best tool that I have ever used to remove haze and to improve images shot through glass. Truly I have never found anything as good

  • Optics - DXO is still the only company that matches lens profiles to sensors. This means a specific profile for each lens and camera body together. True, not every combination on earth is covered, but I have not had one missed yet across Canon and Nikon or even Fujifilm. When you think that existing lens profiles are great, move up to this product and see the difference

  • U-Point - This is the selection based editing that first came out with the original Nik Collection but now you can use U-Point for local edits to complement the regular global edits.

  • RAW Processing - every editor has its own RAW processor. DXO even makes a dedicated RAW processor. DXO Photolab has one of the finest RAW processors in the market and I think it often does a better job than Adobe products

  • Repair - DXO Photolab has Photoshop like repair and clone tools, with more control than those in Lightroom and effectiveness like Photoshop

  • Smart Lighting - One of Photoshop’s great tools is the ability to relight. Smart lighting does this, only quite a bit more simply

  • Image Management - DXO Photolab is NOT a digital asset manager. It does however let you store your images how you want to store them and its Library function keeps track of where they are and allows comprehensive searching and markup of image information.

Lightroom Classic Integration - If you love your Adobe Photographer’s Bundle, DXO Photolab has direct integration to Lightroom Classic. When you send to DXO Photolab from Lightroom it sends the actual RAW file. The original file is not changed, but your edited version is returned to Lightroom as JPEG, TIFF or linear DNG allowing the Lightroom Classic user to take advantage to DXO’s RAW processing.

There are a ton of additional features as one would expect. The company offers a try before you buy option that is time based not feature bereft. So you can try it with no risk and if you don’t like it, you stop there. Cost to purchase outright is $219 CAD and it is sold in different currencies. That’s about two years of the Photographer’s Bundle and upgrades for a fee show up about that often, so if you like it and use it, your cost over time does go down.

I would never recommend a product that I do not own and have paid for myself. I do recommend this product, as well as other offerings from the DXO family. Here’s a link to the product page.

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I'm Ross Chevalier, thanks for reading, watching and listening and until next time, peace.