It’s a long, long way from novice-orientated programs like Photoshop Elements or Skylum Luminar, for example, and it’s clearly designed for photographers who know what they want to do and how to do it.
It’s easy to apply automatic corrections and preset ‘looks’ in DxO PhotoLab, but the manual adjustments are detailed and technical.
If you have the FilmPack and ViewPoint add-ons installed, these have their own palettes too.Īlong the top of the screen is a slim tools panel containing zoom tools, crop and straighten tools, Local Adjustments and more, while along the bottom of the screen is a thumbnail filmstrip showing the contents of the c currently selected folder. The default workspace displays a Histogram panel here, Essential Tools, Light, Colour, Detail and Geometry palettes. Over on the right side of the screen is the main tools area, containing a stack of collapsible palettes, each with is own set of tools which can be expanded or contracted via little arrows. The real editing work, though, is done in the Customize tab. You use the PhotoLibrary tab to browse your image folders, organise images into Projects (‘virtual’ albums) and use the new search tool.
The PhotoLab interface is organised into two tabs. You can use it for simple one-click corrections, but getting the best from it demands a bit more expertise. PhotoLab is pretty technical, and it’s aimed more at experts than beginners. Please use these B&H affiliate link lists for researching and purchasing hardware and help keep Unititled.Net going.The FilmPack 5 add-on integrates with PhotoLab 2.1 to offer some superb black and white rendering options, though it is an additional purchase. Exposure Compensation in DxO PhotoLab 5.1.0
The results are above and the final version of the X-Pro2’s X-Trans photograph is below, with the addition of DxO ClearView Plus at 50 percent.
I chose Color Negative Film/Fuji Pro 400H for both as this film simulation offered the most accurate rendering of the colours I saw in front of me. So this morning I made exposures on both cameras of the most iconic Australian house, the home Harry Seidler built for his mother Rose, and processed the raw files with almost the same settings. When DxO PhotoLab 5 and DxO FilmPack 6 were announced with their beta support for X-Trans, I was a little concerned they might not offer feature parity between Bayer and X-Trans raw files. Instead, I often carry a fast or ultra-wide prime on the X-Pro2 and a slower but versatile and small zoom lens on the GX8, both cameras on neck straps and swapped about as the situation demands. My Fujifilm X-Pro2 and Panasonic Lumix GX8 remain my first choices for documentary photography but I don’t have the ideal set of lenses for each and we don’t have the budget for the perfect camera and lens kit in either system. Plenty of often-frustrating lens collection gaps remain but I persist with both as their sensor sizes and consequent capabilities are both sides of the documentary photography and video production sweet spot. Newer camera and lens systems such as Fujifilm’s APS-C/Super 35 X Series and Panasonic’s Lumix Micro Four Thirds/Super 16 (almost) G Series are still adding essential prime and zoom lenses and are updating older ones. When using several different cameras and lenses on a given project, mixing Bayer sensors with X-Trans, I’ve had to process them in some other application such as Adobe Photoshop or Capture One Pro but I have always missed the DxO applications’ unique capabilities.
I have always obtained the best results from DxO software for documentary photographs, especially those made in available darkness, due to PhotoLab’s great noise reduction algorithms and they became even better when DxO added DeepPRIME demosaicing and denoising to PhotoLab’s toolkit.Īnother key feature of PhotoLab plus FilmPack in their Elite versions is their vast range of camera profiles meaning I could mix cameras on a project then process the images to look like they are made from just one camera.Ī further wrinkle on that is the ability to make raw files shot with a Lumix GX8 look like they were made with, say, a Leica M10.
While the folks at DxO were declaring that they had no intention of supporting Fujifilm X-Trans raw and JPEG files, other raw processing and image editing software makers were getting on with the job of adding then improving their X-Trans support. Image made on Panasonic Lumix DMC-GX8 with Lumix G Vario 12-32mm f/3.5-5.6 Mega OIS lens, 24mm equivalent.