DxO Optics Pro Review
by Neil van Niekerk

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DXO OPTICS ENGINE

Even the most expensive lenses show a certain amount of image degradation, whether distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration or blur.

And these are the defects in specific lenses that the DxO Optics Engine was designed to "reverse out". Automatically.

The DxO literature describes the DxO Optics Engine as:

The software was designed to compensate for the residual defects of a lens' design. The DxO Optics Engine works on the principle of creating a detailed model of lens performance by taking thousands of images with each lens for which a DxO Lens Module is created.

The DxO Lens Module is then used by the DxO Optics Engine algorithms to "reverse out" all the defects. This way of working means the optical corrections are based on the "real-world" defects of the lens, rather than on estimates, and can be fully automated.

The current DxO Optics Engine correction is fairly exhaustive - chromatic, geometric, axial and field-dependent aberrations can be corrected simultaneously, and if desired, automatically. This is done in accordance with taking conditions such as focal length and aperture.

Now to be honest, that is more optical physics than most photographers ever want to touch - but the problems do affect us as photographers. As an example, an optical problem such as chromatic aberration, is fairly easy for any photographer to see when it rears its ugly head.

Sure, you can fix chromatic aberration with Photoshop - but this is the beauty of DxO Optics Pro - the corrections are applied automatically, with the option of full manual control. And it is done taking into consideration the specific lens design and focal length and focus distance.

I tried this on numerous images, and the results were always spot-on. In Auto Mode.

In this image for example, you can see the chromatic aberration corrected when you look at the 100% crop of the top left hand corner.

Look for the green / purple fringing around the balustrade in the left hand image which is uncorrected. The image on the right has the chromatic aberration automatically corrected in DxO Optics. This immediately makes the image detail crisper.
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Notice how barrel distortion was corrected, and the lines of the building straightened out.

In this image, Chromatic Aberration was also corrected, but won't be noticeable
on such a small image.

The DxO Optics Engine tab has four sections. In the first, you can adjust the focal length if you feel you want to fine-tune the results even further. In this example I used the Nikon 12-24mm f4 lens, and the focal length can be incrementally changed between 12mm and 13mm. If the focusing distance isn't available in the EXIF data, then the screen allows you to enter the distance manually, since this information is used to correct for these aberrations Distortion corrects for barrel and pincushion distortion, and other aberrations Chromatic Aberration also holds a check mark for correction of purple fringing / birefringence. This is where you see purple edges around high-contrast areas with over-exposed highlights. Vignetting is also corrected for specific lenses, and for the specific focal length used.