Software & Computers DxO Optics Pro 5.3; Raw Converter & Image Enhancer With Auto Or Manual Transmission By Howard Millard March, 2009 Whether you shoot raw or JPEG, whether you re on the Windows or Mac platform, the latest edition of DxO Optics Pro, Version 5.3, offers sophisticated automated image enhancement and raw conversion. For advanced users, all controls can be fully tweaked manually as well. Furthermore, DxO says Version 5 is up to four times faster than Version 4. Based on their own lab s test data of camera and lens performance, DxO Optics Pro 5.3 provides natural color, smooth, detailed raw conversions and eliminates optical defects by removing lens distortion, vignetting, lens softness, and chromatic aberration. Furthermore, major perspective correction is at your fingertips. DxO first wowed me a few years back with its automated perspective correction for a wide angle lens. Contrast and exposure optimization facilitate highlight recovery and open up shadow detail. DxO provides local correction each part of the image is treated separately but there are no visible seams or halos. The raw conversion engine has been redesigned to produce more detail and fewer artifacts. Here s how it works: noise reduction is performed up front, before noise has a chance to be amplified by the raw conversion process and degrade details. In techno speak, this means applying a new demosaicing algorithm that processes data from more distant as well as neighboring pixels to reconstruct detail. The results, according to DxO, are greater clarity, crisper details, and more true-to-life colors, along with significant reductions in graininess and other artifacts. For low-light shooting, noise removal can really clean up images shot at high ISOs, giving you up to two more stops of working range. This noise removal technology is specially tailored for each camera that DxO supports. Specific Support All automatic enhancements (which can be modified to your taste) are based on extensive testing by DxO of the cameras and lenses that it supports. These include cameras from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax, Konica Minolta, Fuji, Kodak, Olympus, Panasonic, and Samsung, and lenses from
these as well as Sigma, Tamron, and Tokina. Go to www.dxo.com to check exactly which specific models and lenses are covered. Incidentally, these profiles are included with the software you don t pay more for them. New profiles are added for download from the DxO website as new models are introduced and tested. New Interface If you ve worked with previous versions, the first thing you notice about DxO Optics Pro 5.3 is the new, streamlined interface (#1) as seen in the Mac version I tested. Designed to simplify and enhance workflow, four tabs are used to select each of four logical steps: Select, Prepare, Process, and Review. Clicking on the Select tab opens a Browse panel on the left where you navigate to the images you want to work on. If you select a folder, the pictures within it appear in the central Content panel, either as images or file names. 1 For each one you want to work on, double-click it or drag it to the Project panel across the bottom of the window. You can name the project and save it or leave it untitled. Once in the Project area, each image can be rotated and given a star ranking. The presence of a check mark icon indicates that DxO has created a camera and lens profile for that shot. Prepare Tab Click the Prepare tab and a new window will open, with the Project panel containing your selected photos in the same position at bottom. This Prepare window (#2) is where you ll correct and enhance exposure, color, contrast, cropping, detail, and other attributes. To start processing an image, double-click on it in the Project panel and it will open in the main Prepare window.
2 All Photos 2009, Howard Millard, All Rights Reserved Note that a warning label superimposed over the top right of the photo indicates that certain corrections will not be visible at this scale. This info can be toggled on or off by clicking on the i icon in a turquoise circle at the right just above the photo window. To the top right, you see a group of nine icons for palettes for Move/Zoom, Histogram, Presets, Exif, Light, Color, Geometry, Detail, and My Palette. To access the controls and adjustments for each palette, click on the icon and drop-down menus open in the right-hand panel. If you change a setting, then later want to return to the default, just click on the checkbox to the right of the palette. The Presets palette lets you create, save, and apply preset adjustments you have made in the Prepare tab so you can apply them to a single photo or a group of photos later. Light Palette In the Light palette (#3) you adjust overall exposure, then you can choose a preset Highlight Preservation option here set to Strong. Next, move down to DxO Lighting. Similar to Photoshop s Shadow/Highlight tool, this will brighten the image depending on the light level of each area, without clipping either the shadows or the highlights, according to DxO. Further sliders adjust black and white points as well as gamma and contrast levels. Finally, a tonal curve is available for those who prefer it to sliders.
3 Color Palette Next in line is the Color palette (#4). Here, the Vibrancy slider similar to that found in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and Lightroom saturates low saturation colors more than highly saturated ones. The goal is a more natural look than that obtained from the Saturation adjustment, which is found under HSL (described below) within DxO.
4 Color Rendering allows you to increase or decrease the intensity of color with a slider and via presets for different camera, film, and ICC profiles. These include as shot, camera body, color positive, color negative, black and white, cross-processed, and ICC profile. Choices range from about 25 different camera bodies to 12 color positive films to two cross-processed stocks. Color Modes offers preset Styles, including black and white and six toning options with contrast and saturation variations. Here, I applied a selenium tone to a color original. HSL proffers Hue, Saturation, and Luminance sliders. The Multi-Point Color Balance tool allows you to set and modify color in up to four selected areas of your image. The last Color palette option is to set the raw white balance. As in ACR, there are drop-down presets and separate Color Temperature and Tint sliders. If you don t see these, click show more options. If you don t like the default, try the drop-down choices such as Daylight, Cloudy, or Flash, and/or fine-tune with the sliders. If you fiddle with these for a while and don t like the results, just go back to the top and select as shot to return to the original settings. The Geometry palette (#5) includes a leveling device, a Horizon tool, and a Crop tool. The Keystoning adjustment tools shown here can correct the geometry of objects that have been subjected to lens distortion. This is especially useful for architectural photography, but also for general work with wide lenses and in tight spaces where you can t (or don t want to) center the camera relative to the subject. You can use a pair of vertical or horizontal lines to straighten objects, or draw a four-sided box for rectangular or square subjects. Here, in the original image
on the left, I drew lines (in green) to indicate where I wanted the edges of the building to line up. The image on the right shows how DxO Optics Pro 5.3 s Keystoning tools transformed the angles. 5 If your creative urge favors tilting the image plane up, down, or sideways, go for it using the four sliders located beneath the Keystoning tools. You ll also find a Scaling tool here. Next come controls for Distortion, Volume Anamorphosis (to recover the shape of spheres and cylinders), and Focusing Distance. 6 To show a full-size example of DxO Optics Pro 5.3 s Geometry correction, I started with a shot of a church steeple and other buildings bent by a wide angle lens shooting upward (#6). Under Geometry, in the Keystoning section (#7), I clicked on the center icon of two vertical parallel lines (highlighted in orange). In the original image, on the left, I drew lines (in green) vertically through the center of the steeple and along the side of the building on the right to indicate where I wanted the lines to be vertical. After processing (#8), the lines are now parallel and the
buildings are standing up straight. Cropping or cloning will be required for the lower right corner, but the perspective distortion is gone. 7 8 To adjust sharpening and noise removal, go to the Detail palette (#9). Many photographers prefer to apply no or very minimal sharpening during the raw conversion, preferring to wait until the files have been converted, copied, and re-sized for printing. If you do want to sharpen here, the Unsharp Mask controls are similar to those in Photoshop. Grain can be adjusted to match the profile of many different films, and its intensity varied. To use the Dust Removal tool, click on the eraser brush and set the width with the slider.
9 Chromatic Aberration sliders (#10) let you remove any color fringing problems that were not handled automatically through the lens profile. This is useful if you are using a lens for which there is no profile or if there is more chromatic aberration than the profile removed. Zoom out to 100 percent magnification, then adjust the sliders until the color fringing disappears. 10 For noise removal, play with the sliders and see how you like the results. At low ISOs, very little may be needed. For low-light, high ISO shots, you may need to crank it up all the way to the
right. The Grey Equalizer slider can neutralize color in the noise still in the image and/or the color area where noise was removed. The My Palette icon lets you set up aliases of the palettes and sub-palettes you use most, but without preset settings. Process Tab In the Process window (#11) your images are processed automatically when you click on the Start Processing button at the top center of the screen. But before you click, be sure that you ve adjusted the settings you want for your conversion on the left side of the screen. Options include: Output name, Format (TIFF, JPEG, or Linear DNG only), Compression, Force 8 bits (to reduce a 16-bit raw file to 8 bits), Destination folder, Filename suffix such as _DxO, Size, Resolution (such as 300dpi), and ICC profile (such as Adobe RGB). 11 Some photographers keep their images at 16 bits until just before printing. Why? Significant corrections can be made to a 16-bit file without damage or loss of data, as may occur with the same operations performed on an 8-bit file. Here, I converted to 8 bits for magazine reproduction requirements. Once you start processing, a status bar shows the progress and a read-out tells you how many of the total images have been processed. Review Tab In the Review window (#12) you can see how your conversions look and zoom in with a slider to check areas you re interested in. Here, I used DxO Lighting, Auto-Medium, to open up a dark statue and leaves in the shade. Before (left) and after (right) images are displayed in the window. If things don t look the way you want, you can go back to the Prepare tab, change the settings,
and process your photo again. Of course, you ll also want to review your processed images in Adobe s Photoshop or any other image editor you use. 12 Conclusion While the first release of Version 5 for Windows had some slow speed problems and other bugs, several updates address these issues. The Mac version was released in July 2008, with a free 5.3 update for both platforms released in fall 2008. Version 5.3 includes 64-bit support for Windows, Lightroom 2 compatibility, raw conversion to handle ISOs up to 25,600, faster download times for the program, and new camera and lens profiles. Modules for the Nikon D90 and Canon EOS 50D were not up at press time, but should be by the time you read this. One problem I had was that some previews were garbled. I e-mailed tech support who responded with a fix: in the DxO preferences, uncheck GPU acceleration. While it requires a robust computer, DxO Optics Pro 5.3 is a powerful professional-level tool that offers unusually extensive controls for either automated or manual raw conversion with noise removal, control over color and detail rendering, and correction of distortion. Price & Availability DxO Optics Pro 5.3 is available in two versions, Standard for $150 and Elite for $240 (street price). Both offer the same controls, but Standard works with amateur to high-end prosumer cameras such as the Canon EOS 10D through 40D and the Nikon D40 through D300, as well as other brands. The Elite edition adds high-end pro cameras and lenses such as the Canon EOS 5D and above and the Nikon D700, D2, and D3. Be sure to check the DxO website for details and minimum system requirements, and a free trial download. DxO Optics Pro 5.3 can be used as a stand-alone application and/or with included import plug-ins for Adobe s Photoshop and Lightroom.