10 Surprising and Unique Features in DxO PhotoLab 5

today in this video we're going to take a look at 10 unique features in photo lab a raw photo processing application made by dxo photo lab is not new it's been around for a few years now but there is a new version version 5 which just came out which has some new features of course of its own but there are also some older features in photo labs some older features that are unique to photo lab that you may not be aware of if you are currently using a different raw photo processing application and you've never taken a look at photo lab before speaking of other raw photo processing applications if you happen to be a user of adobe lightroom classic well right now you may be thinking a video about dxophotolab not for me i'm good with lightroom thanks anyway well let me stop you before you go and share with you that the latest version of photo lab version five dxo did something rather interesting they incorporated round trip raw uh photo processing and editing between photo lab and lightroom so you may begin a raw edit in photo lab then bounce that raw file over to lightroom continue working on it there or you can do the opposite you can take a dng file from your lightroom catalog and kick it over to photo lab and as part of this video i'm going to be demonstrating in greater detail how that whole round trip editing process works but right now we need to wrap this intro up because i have 10 unique features in photo lab to get through and to share with you so we need to get going but before we do a quick disclaimer to let you know that this video is sponsored by dxo the maker of photo lab however i think it's really important for you to know that dxo has had no editorial input in this video at all they have not told me what to say they haven't even seen this video prior to publication so everything that you're going to hear in this video is my opinion and experience using photo lab and honestly i would have made the exact same video anyway and i'd be saying the exact same things with or without dxo sponsorship dxo was just kind enough to help support the production cost of this video which i greatly appreciate so with that out of the way let's get going now your first indication that something is a little bit different about photo lab comes right at the very beginning after the software has been installed and you are prompted to choose how raw images should be handled now your choices include just you know going with the standard approach which means the software is going to auto-correct everything for you you can also choose no corrections the software doesn't do anything it doesn't touch your raw file by default or the second option which is the one that i chose is to apply optical corrections only and the second option in my opinion is great for photographers who simply want to begin their raw editing process using a better straight out of camera raw image you'll also notice from time to time this window prompting you to download optics modules for the cameras and lenses used to create your raw images now these modules are the result of nearly 20 years of work by dxo analyzing and testing hundreds of different cameras and lenses these modules are in my opinion really the foundation of photo lab they automatically fix common problems like chromatic aberration vignette and distortion but in my experience the results are oftentimes better than similar lens corrections applied using other software oh and by the way good news for those of you who own a fuji camera dxo photolab 5 now supports fuji x-trans raw files next unique feature in dxo photo lab is the lens sharpness tool now this tool goes hand in hand with those optics modules i was talking about just a second ago because through dxo's analysis of the hundreds of different camera bodies and thousands of different camera lenses out there dxo has also analyzed sharpness they also know down at the pixel level where a lens tends to be sharp and where a lens tends to be not so sharp so the lens sharpness tool over here in the right column when you enable it what it does is it is applying sharpness at the pixel level at like the the micro level instead of just applying a blanket a sharpening uh value and applying just sharpening uniformly across the entire image it is applying sharpening in a tailored approach in order to make the sharpness of your image more even from corner to corner and edge to edge now if for some reason you want a more traditional sharpness tool you can also turn on unsharp mask if you want to use that that's another sharpening option of course but dxo does recommend if you want to be sharpening your image to be focusing your attention on the lens sharpness tool and really all you have to do is just turn it on and over here in the right column you will see these little magic wands which means that the appropriate sharpening level according to dxo's data and information has been applied to the image and there's nothing more that i really need to do but if i really want to if i really want to you know go in and fine-tune some of this and by the way some of this is probably going to be impossible to see um you know in a video on youtube and but i can tell you just sitting here in front of my uh my benq monitor you know turning this on and off you can i can definitely see the difference in sharpness in these rocks and all these little micro details in here so if you're the kind of person if you're someone like me and you like to uh you know like pixel peep your image and you know get down to the pixel level and look at small details and uh and you're passionate about detail and sharpness the lens sharpness tool in photo lab is definitely worth checking out next unique feature d prime noise reduction this tool naturally removes digital noise from your raw images without adversely affecting detail or sharpness and the results can sometimes be truly incredible especially when processing older raw files for example here's a shot that i captured in new york about seven years ago using an old canon dslr now not a bad camera by any means but its iso and low light performance weren't exactly the best and i was shooting indoors my iso is fairly high and we can see noise in this image by zooming into this area up here this area up here you can see this digital noise that looks blocky and there's color noise happening there's like random pixels and bits of color that just don't belong here at all and now here is the same raw image processed using deep prime noise production in photo lab 5. everything i just pointed out is now gone and most importantly you'll notice that the detail in the architectural elements up here they have not been adversely affected they haven't been softened or blurred which can sometimes happen in other raw editing software when aggressively applying noise reduction when applying noise reduction at a similar level to what we're seeing here in d prime but there's something going on with deep prime behind the scenes dxo claims that there's some ai and machine learning going on where it knows the difference it knows the difference between you know what is noise and what is detail and it's able to effectively separate the two and achieve the results that you're seeing here next unique feature is no image importing sometimes the lack of a feature can be a feature unto itself because dxophotolab unlike other raw editors does not import photos to a library or catalog instead you just simply browse for images on your local hard drives and then edit them directly where they are and this removes a rather common source of confusion especially for new users regarding where exactly their images live i mean where do they go where do they exist physically after they've been imported into an application well photo lab keeps it simple by just letting you browse your hard drive which is great because then you are in control of where and how your images are organized now there are some organizational tools in photo lab if you want to group images together and to do that you create projects you create a new project and then you drag and drop images from your local hard drive into those projects now those images the files they don't move they stay exactly where they are you're just creating references to them in these project folders now one tip here before we move on if you are editing images in a project and you want to browse other images in the same local folder where all those raw files are you may right click on a project image and select reveal image folder and this switches your view to the local folder containing the selected image next unique feature in dxo photo lab is dxo smart lighting this is a really interesting tool to me because this is an exposure correction tool an intelligent exposure correction tool that automates a process that i would bet most photographers do every single time they edit an image and that is to balance the exposure in their shot by bringing down the overexposed areas and to lift the underexposed areas to bring them closer together and this image here is a good example of that there's not much light here on the on the faces of our subject and what your natural instinct here may be is to lift the shadows so we can give that a try and we can lift the shadows here and we could also bring down the highlights as well but what's starting to happen here as you may notice is that the the image is starting to get flat it's like too much light is being introduced into the shadows and it just doesn't look particularly natural it's starting to take on kind of a kind of an hdr look so what we can use instead and actually we can come back to selective tone later you know use it to fine-tune things if we want to but a good place to start with an image like this is to enable dxo smart lighting and when we enable it you can definitely see the difference it is lifting the exposure in the shot and it is brightening the areas of the image where some additional light is needed without affecting areas of the image that don't need any additional light now the important thing you may notice here is that this is actually currently set to uniform so it is automatically analyzing the entire image but because we have people in our shot this is where things get interesting if we go over to spot weighted you'll see here it says two faces detected so there is face detection built into the software it recognizes that there are people in the shot and it recognizes that their skin tone needs to be brightened that it needs to bring up their skin tone and it needs to do so in a way that looks natural and it's doing all this automatically right i mean you're not having to create like a luminosity mask here you're not having to mess around with any other sliders the software has automatically found the faces of our subject and is automatically doing what it assumes you probably want and i i think it does a really really good job of it next unique feature is dxo clearview plus this is a tool that automatically removes atmospheric haze pollution mist and fog from an image in order to improve the clarity of your shop but without negatively impacting areas of your image where there is no problem with clarity for example this shot here this is me actually from a recent trip to iceland and as you can see here in the foreground there's no problem with clarity everything's perfectly clear here in the foreground and the same over here to my left but over here on the right side of the image and definitely you know deep into the landscape back here clarity uh really begins to get soft and the contrast really begins to drop now if you wanted to address this problem and you wanted to introduce some contrast into these areas of the image but without affecting these areas here well it's really simple to do with the clear view plus tool you just enable this and it automatically detects where the areas of the image are that need a little helping hand and then it leaves everything else alone and i can just toggle this on and off and you can see how selective it's being with its adjustment now if the adjustment is too strong and by the way we can go even stronger here if we want to but i think that's a bit much we can dial it back down we can pull the intensity back down a little bit and you know you don't need to go too strong with this stuff i think you know me personally this is a subjective call but i kind of like for there to be some uh atmosphere i don't want to remove all of it at least with this particular image so i'll just bring it back down to somewhere around like 18 something like that and then toggle this on and off and i think that looks a lot better now this is similar to the dehaze tool that you will find in some other raw editors but i think one of the interesting differences with clearview plus is that it is very selective and it's very targeted with the adjustments that it's making next unique feature in dxo photolab 5 is hue saturation and luminosity now i know what some of you may be thinking right now you may be thinking well that's nothing new we have hsl in other programs as well and that's true however the hsl tool in dxo photolab 5 is rather different and it's unique and there's actually some pretty wild power underneath the hood that uh that you may not be aware of so let's begin by activating the hsl panel here and the panel is divided up into different views and or different channels so this main channel here this is the white channel and this is just this affects all the different color channels in the image then we have channels for red orange yellow green and so on and when you click on one of these colors the inner portion of the wheel automatically selects a predetermined range of hues within that particular color so when i click on green green affects these specific hues but i can actually make adjustments to that i can push this more towards blue if i want to include more blue tones with this selection and i can also push this more towards yellows and reds if if i'd like to and while you're doing this by the way if you hold down command and then move the the hue selection here you can see what is being selected by the tool so now that we have our selection this is where it gets pretty wild in most applications you can only push green for example warmer like more towards yellow or cooler more towards blue and your range is limited however the exophotolab does not limit you in the least you can grab this outer wheel here and push it all the way around and do some pretty wild effects here like this is a very like infrared kind of look here if you're going for like that kodak aerochrome kind of look you can easily do it just by pushing all the greens and the yellows in your shot towards pink and towards red and magenta obviously the usefulness of a feature like this is uh you know is somewhat limited but for some people i mean i could definitely see some fine art photographers some commercial photographers some people who really like to push and manipulate the hues and their image in order to create in order to make a stronger artistic statement with their images it's not just like a clever fun thing to do to make infrared images like this is something that has real creative usefulness and application and then what's also interesting is that down here in these sliders you have you know the typical adjustments you would expect in order to affect the saturation of that color you can also affect its brightness if you want to change that but then we have this really interesting tool here called uniformity in uniformity when you turn this up it's effectively bending more of the hues closer together instead of them being further apart on the color wheel you're pushing them closer together to create a more uniform color so there's less variation in that hue within the colors in your image so you can pull this all the way down if you want to and then there's no uniformity at all between them or a little uniformity but then if we push it all the way up well everything is pretty much the same color and this is actually a standard practice in landscape photography too in order to kind of like calm an image down and to reduce some of the visual noise and distraction of the shot is to bend similar hues closer together to create kind of like a more pure image and to almost purify the colors and remove some of the variation next unique feature in photo lab is sharing this is such a small and seemingly unimportant uh function in the application perhaps for some people it will be but to me it's really helpful and i think that photo lab just did such a nice job with this compared to other raw editing applications out there and maybe some of this is only applicable to mac os it may be different on windows but on the mac all you have to do is just select the image that you're that you want to share in the photo library then you come over here to this little share icon and you get this drop down here and you can export to disk which is normal i mean that's a pretty standard thing so i'm just going to do messages here and when you do messages it'll ask you you know how you want it to be uh like how you wanted to format this do you want all the corrections just some of the corrections jpeg tiff what kind of file resolution the resizing mode whether you want some sharpening watermark all this other stuff and when everything looks good you just click export and then check this out you get this little modal inside of photo lab this is so cool and i could actually send this to myself if i want to i can type a message and click send and off it goes and that's it and i don't have to do anything else now for some of you this local adjustments tool in photolab 5 may be a little nostalgic at least i hope it is for some of you i hope i'm not the only one old enough to remember this but uh but i'll show you what i'm talking about so when you click on local adjustments you then click on the area of the image that you want to affect so again i'd like to bring down the the heat of the highlights here a little bit so i'm just going to click on that and the local adjustments tool here is automatically creating a luminosity mask now this is the nostalgic part here this is uh from this is borrowed from the old nick collection and when this came out back in the day i mean this was quite revolutionary this was a pretty big deal and the way that this works is right now the mask is on so anything that's white is going to be affected by the adjustment that i make and anything as dark is not going to be affected now when you click on when you create a control point you can actually grab this control point and just drag it to something else you can drag it to the rock and check that out i mean now we are selecting all of the darkest pixels in the image we are selecting um the dark tones and the rocks and in the sand and the foreground and the sky is no longer selected so let's drag this back over to here now my options here i can go through and start affecting light i could be adding exposure adjusting shadows highlights you can also go in and start playing around with vibrancy saturation tint temperature and hue and you can also mess around with the optics you can increase or decrease sharpness in addition to blur now again what i would like to do is bring down the heat of this particular area so i'd like to bring down some of the brightness values there and i can either use the the exposure tool in order to do that or if you if you double click on the tool by the way it resets to the default value or i can just target the highlights and pull that down a little bit and we're starting to get a little more color we're starting to get a little more detail in that area and it's not looking quite as as hot as it did before oh yeah one thing i forgot to mention is that if you come up here to the right column and then you click on the local adjustments tab here here is where you have additional tools to be controlling the mask selection that you're making so you can adjust the luminosity range of your mask you can brighten it or darken it basically when it starts getting brighter that means you are selecting more brightness tones in the image and an opacity tool to also be fine tuning your mask now control point isn't the only local adjustment tool available in photo lab 5. if we right-click on another region of the image we then get this radial menu here that makes it possible for us to create another mask to be adding another local adjustment in addition to the other one that we just created and we could do things like create a control line we could do a graduated filter let's see i'm going to drag it up from down here this way and then we get the same uh you know tools here available to us and then i can bring down the exposure a little bit and the effect is graduated right it's just like pushing a graduated filter into a filter holder if i was out in the field making this change and then finally our last unique feature is one that was added to the most recent version of photolab version 5 and that is round trip raw photo editing between dxo photo lab 5 and adobe lightroom classic now let's say for example this image here that you're looking at i want to do all of my color grading and editing work in lightroom i'm perfectly happy using lightroom i like using lightroom for this type of work but i want to take advantage of those lens correction profiles in photolab5 do some uh you know fix the distortion fix vignette chromatic aberration maybe do some denoising too with the uh with the deep prime uh denoising tool and then bring that raw image back into lightroom to do the rest of my edits thereafter well this is now actually really easy to do all you have to do is come up here to the file menu come down to plug-in extras and select transfer to dxo photo lab 5. you select that we bounce over to photolab 5 and as you can see or as you may have noticed just a second ago the the appropriate optics modules for this particular camera and lens have been loaded and applied to the image the distortion has been fixed the vignette has been fixed so we have the dng file here now to get this file back over into lightroom with the corrections that we've applied here in dxo photo lab you then click on this lightroom export button here now if you don't see lightroom export you just right click on it and there's multiple options in here for different things so then you get this module here now we have different options here and one of the most important ones to look at is this format action here we want a dng file we want a raw dng file that we could be using to be performing the rest of our raw edits and the options that we have here is to export it with all corrections applied that means any exposure corrections color mods anything that i've done in photo lab are going to be included in the dng file the next option down is denoise and optical corrections only so that's what i was talking about just a minute ago the optics module the lens corrections or you can export the selected files without processing effectively you're just bouncing the image back without doing anything to it but what i'm going to choose is the denoise and optical corrections only that's all we really need then we click on export okay so now we're back in adobe lightroom classic our new dng file produced by photolab5 has been imported and the thing you will notice down here in the file name for the raw files that now we have underscore dxo that's because photolith5 has created a new dng file that contains the lens corrections and that denoising work that we did just a second ago here is the original that uh that we were looking at just a second ago and then here is the new dxo dng file that photolab5 created so there's clean separation then between the original straight out of camera raw file if for some reason you want to go back and re-edit it do something new with it and this new dxo dng produced by photo lab5 and then at this point we can go into the develop panel here and we can do the rest of our color grading okay but what about the reverse what if we edited our raw file originally using dxo photo lab5 and now for some reason we want to export it and use it in adobe lightroom classic well here is an example here of how that works again click lightroom export except this time instead of doing the denoise and optical corrections only we're going to do all corrections applied and then we click export now i've already done this once before so i'm just going to click overwrite okay so once again we're back in adobe lightroom classic and once again we have a new dng file with underscore dxo appended to the file name well what's interesting is that photolab 5 has taken those edits that i made to color to exposure to you know tone curve and everything else and has baked those changes into the raw data into the dna of the image because you'll notice that over here in the right side of lightroom in the develop panel nothing has been changed nothing has been edited they're not trying to remap values from you know a slider in photolab 5 to a slider in lightroom instead they just bake it directly into the dna of the image and i know that's true because if we come back out here and go back to i'll show you the original raw file this is the actual original raw file and this is what it looked like straight out of camera so in summary here whether you are primarily an adobe lightroom classic user or a dxo photo lab 5 user you can work in both applications you can be editing your raw files using both which is really great because then you have the best of both worlds because then you're able to use whichever tool sets you want you're able to leverage the relative strengths of each software application in order to create better raw images because that's the goal at the end of the day right all right hope you enjoyed this rundown of 10 unique features in dxo photo lab 5. i would love to know if you are a photo lab user what did i miss is there anything that should have been on my list please let me know down in the comments below if you would like to check out dxo photo lab 5 for yourself dxo does offer a free trial of the software doesn't cost anything you don't have to enter a credit card number or anything like that you can just download the app and install it to your mac or windows machine check it out open some raw images try editing them especially if you are a lightroom user open up some of those raw files in photo lab bounce them over to lightroom and uh check it out and see what you think about using photo lab either just by itself or photo lab with lightroom classic i think it's worth the time especially since the uh the holidays are coming up you're probably gonna have time to kill anyway so it's a good time to be downloading um a trial of some software checking it out and uh i would recommend doing so so check the link below in the description to download a free trial speaking of downloading a free trial while you are at the dxo website i would also recommend downloading a free trial of another uh dxo application that was recently updated and that is film pack six dxo film pack is a collection of classic black and white and color film emulations that you may use to magically transform those flat gray raw files into images that appear to have been shot using uh classic films made by ilford by fuji by agfa by kodak of course and there's plenty more film emulations in this application as well and one of the cool things about film pack in addition to all the classic film emulations that are included is the fact that film pack functions as both a standalone application you can just open an image directly in film pack and transform it or you can also use film pack through photo lab it actually unlocks some unique features and capabilities in photo lab you can transform your images using those classic film stocks in photo lab so if you're into classic film if you like the classic film look and it's something that uh you you like creatively with your photography or if you have a particular project for a client something like that and you're looking for some classic film stocks to use like they're looking for that particular look well this is a really good option to try so again this is also a free trial so while you are at the dxo website downloading a free trial of photo lab download a free trial of film pack 2 and check it out again check the description below for a download like if you'd like to download either application thanks so much for being here i hope you enjoyed the video happy holidays everyone i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Todd Dominey

Views: 11,790

Keywords: landscape photography, photography, todd dominey, dxo, dxo photolab, photolab 5, photolab review, photolab and lightroom, dxo filmpack, filmpack, filmpack 6, photo editing, raw editing

Id: HGI8PIjBHMs

Length: 28min 7sec (1687 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 20 2021