DxO Optics Pro Review
by Neil van Niekerk

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GENERAL CONTROLS

Even though DxO Optics Pro brings its own flavour to the following controls, they should be familiar to anyone who has used photo editing software.

- Exposure
- White balance picker
- Curves
- Hue / Saturation / Lightness control
- Histogram
- Image Information / Exif Data
- Output Settings (output file format & colour space)
- Sharpening

(The DxO specific tabs - Optics , Lighting and Noise, will be discussed on following pages.)

By double clicking on an image in the thumbnail pane of the DxO Workspace, a preview will open up. A collection of tabs should also open up, with controls that will be used to adjust and enhance the image. If the tabs don't show, they can be called up via the menu. Workspace >> Show Controls.

I'm not going to go over all the controls, since they are self-explanatory to any digital photographer.
There are no surprises in how DxO Optics Pro present these, since their menus and control tabs are clearly marked and has a logical layout to them. This of course is a huge positive for this program, since the learning curve is not as steep if you are already accustomed to image editing programs.

But the following items might be of specific interest:

The Control tabs can be unlinked (ie, split up), making it easier to see certain factors at the same time. In this example, the zoom tab was moved away from the tab group. Certain changes need to be seen at 100% or larger, to see the effect. Example, noise reduction and sharpening.

In this screen grab, the zoom tab is separate from the group for a detailed view.
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The Zoom tab is a necessity in that you can only see the effects of sharpening and noise reduction while zoomed into the actual pixel level. Although preview image is an excellent way of judging global changes to the image, certain changes need to be seen in detail. The Zoom button shows selection of image, with ALL the processing applied.

The WB clicker (which is available under the 'Color and Exposure' tab, works like any other WB pick. Under the zoom tab, you can see a before and after preview of what the white balance would be if the area under the eye-dropper tool was clicked on. This helps in giving a better idea of whether the intended area will be a good point to pick a neutral white balance from. If you don't want to click between the tabs, it is simple enough to disconnect the tabs from the main group.

The Exif Editor is useful for adding copyright info to any images. To save the same info to multiple images, it is easy enough to create a new preset to do just this. Save this as a preset, and disable all other settings, and enable only the exif editor. This will keep all other edits the same, and just add copyright info.

Another display that you should be familiar with, is the histogram.
A nice feature of DxO Optics Pro, is that the histogram is calculated on the cropped display. This helps in eliminating non-relevant highlights in judging your exposure via the histogram, and will help in a detailed analysis of the image.

Under the Sharpening Tab, there are two settings:

- USM, the already well-known method of sharpening.
- DxO Lens Softness.

DxO Lens softness corrects for inherent optical softness, and is dependent on lens & body combination, just like all the other DxO controls. Obviously it can't correct for camera shake or subject movement or mis-focusing.

As can be expected from the design philosophy behind DxO Optics Pro, image sharpness is calibrated for the specific lens used. Therefore the sharpness that is applied via DxO Lens Softness, can vary across the frame. It is recommended that most sharpening is done with the DxO Lens Softness control, and then some USM added as required.

Output settings:

DxO previews are in sRGB mode, even if output is in Adobe RGB.

DxO Optics Pro can save in DNG format, and do so at the same time as saving to Jpg or Tiff.
Saving in DNG allows you to save the unique features of DxO Optics and still maintain an Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) workflow.