DxO Optics Pro Review
by Neil van Niekerk

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WORKSPACE & SETTINGS

For me it is important that a imaging program be intuitive enough that you can get the gist of it by just playing around with it.

Obviously a lot of the functionality of a complex program is discovered by going through the manual or help files - but I still feel that since photography is a visual medium, the programs that we use in digital photography should by definition be easy to grasp visually.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The menu layout seems simple enough, and has the usual user interface w/ drop-down menus and tooltips. The buttons and menus are clearly marked and labled. No surprises here, and it all seems like design and function was thoroughly considered. The manual too is thorough, and written in an easy-to-follow style.

Here is what the the workspace looks like. This is the main screen, and from which you will control the function of DxO Optics software. The Controls palette is movable, and I expanded it there just for illustration.

A screen-capture of the menu and toolbars of the workspace:
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When you click on "Add Images" icon, or click on File >> "Add Images" in the menu, then a separate browser screen opens up. It makes the workspace less cluttered with the browser separate from the main function of the DxO Optics software.

The workspace has a preview window & preview window toolbar. The browser window has two re-sizable panes, with the left-hand pane showing the folder structure. The right-hand pane shows file listing or thumbnails.

The screen capture of the browser window shows the clarity of the menu and toolbars.
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When you have images open in the workspace, there are 'filters' available with which you dictate which images should be processed, and which not. You can also remove images from the workspace to help clear up the clutter on the light-box. 'Remove images' just removes images from the workspace, and doesn't delete them.

With the images loaded into the main window, clicking on any image opens up a pane with all possible corrections - as can be seen in the top image on this page.

The status bar at bottom will tell you which camera & lens combination.
(DxO Optics Pro adjusts and corrects each image according to algorithms for specific lenses at specific focal lengths and focus distances.)

There are buttons in the workspace window to show highlight and shadow clipping, which are useful tools in making a decision about exposure correction and the dynamic range in the image.

Cropping of the raw file is also possible - whether unconstrained, or to any number of aspect ratios. However, you can only crop individual images. It isn't possible to crop multiple files like you can with ACR or Capture One.

There are some quirks to DxO Optics that need a little bit of getting used to:
Batch processing disables the main program. ie, you can only run one batch at a time.
When DxO batches, the entire workspace window disappears, to be replaced by a status window.

Figure shows the batch dialogue window that opens during processing.

If you're used to how Adobe Camera Raw processes raw files in the background, this is going to seem like an interruption to you with the main screen (the workspace) disappearing. More annoyingly, the screen jumps in position on the task bar, inbetween editing and batch processing. If you are using multiple windows, the tab position on your task bar changes position.

But that is the only unlikable aspect I could find in the layout and controls of DxO Optics Pro - and it is a minor one. For the rest, I have to restate again that it is obvious that the program designers took great care in making this program user-friendly.