The ULTIMATE DxO Quick Start Tutorial

welcome back to dxo tutorials today we are going to attempt to do the most comprehensive in-depth uh maybe not in-depth but most comprehensive uh straightforward tutorial let's get going working with this program to date so let's get going when you open dxo this is what you're going to see you probably won't see an image here it'll say no image currently displayed or available then that is because your note is at the top here you are in photo library mode uh you have this whole tree here it is just the same tree you see on your computer window system we're working with windows here by the way so everything you see as far as menus will pertain to windows mac is a little bit different looking anyways you will see your typical tree layout you will go to whatever folder did you hear me whatever folder you have your picture in and choose your picture your entire library or your entire computer is your library and your library is your computer so anywhere that image is is where you will select it and where you selected that image that folder is exactly where dxo is going to put the metadata file all the information for that edit is that cool or what so one more time when you pick an image in a folder the the editing data is going right back next to that image in fact the editing data will be named it'll be the exact number it'll be dxo with the exact number of the image the raw image that you edited making it very simple very easy to keep track of your stuff so once you decide what image you would like to bring in in this case we have this little birdie on the beach you need to be aware that dxo is going to do some things automatically if you want it to so if you want to follow me to preferences we're going to go up to edit down to preferences as you saw me do not waiting for you of course we have a couple things you want to be aware of first of all you're going to want to look at all these and check it out read read read but most importantly these two settings right here that i'm circling with the mouse right here correction settings these are default uh corrections that will happen if you would like them to given each type of image so i have it set up specifically for for a specific reason here and i'll explain it my raw images that i bring in for you folks who don't know what a raw image is it is an unedited image i have it on dxo standard so here are your corrections dxo standard is just going to do very basic adjustments it's going to do a basic sharpening based on the optics of the lens used it's going to take care of chromatic aberrations it's going to take care of any vignette vignetting and a couple other things any distortion i think that's about it distorted and oh it's going to also add smart lighting so it's just going to apply just a uniform smart light right across doesn't matter if there's a person in it just going to be uniform smart lighting right across the picture and that is how i have it set up for every raw image that i import into dxo now when you go to rgb images so we're talking about tiffs we're talking about uh jpegs i have it set up a bit differently i have it set up to no correction at all the reason for this is because quite often in my workflow i will use other programs such as luminar for instance once i have used luminar and exported a jpeg for instance and sometimes i just want to use dxo for instance just for a watermark i don't want to bring in a jpeg and have dxo apply all those corrections to that poor compressed jpeg because it will absolutely ruin your picture so that is why i have this bottom rgb images to no correction allowing me to easily just bring in those jpegs throw the watermark on it and be done with it that said let's get started guys uh here is the image if you want to look at the other parts of that preference menu uh feel free there are different uh here are the different behaviors that will be shown or basically the information shown when you hover over your libraries so when i hover over the uh library photos this is the information that will be on off and how it behaves it's all very uh pretty much self-explanatory let's just get started on using and editing with dxo first thing you're going to want to do when you've selected your image is go to customize to put the dxo in the editing mode and you can see we're in the editing mode now and i will just maximize our space uh there are various modules you uh can see on the left hand side here with the view so just check out your view overlay and you can customize what you see and uh what you want to see you can hide your palette show palettes etc right now i just have the history and the histogram and there is a little zoom picture of our image so let's go ahead and get to work there is also i don't you don't see it here but you can bring up a view so you can add um your name excuse me you can add metadata to the file your name and author and all that stuff the date let's get started editing the image uh a nice little beach scene how we want to start here is going to our light tab on the far left and what i like to do when i have an image is first ask myself well what does it need what what does the image need to make it look right and so let's just start at the top and we'll add some contrast of course 13 looks pretty good getting going here when you see a microcontrast wow look at that little blue button on the side that is an auto function so that is one of quite a few uh modules or tools in which dxo has uh decided for you the optimum setting for the microcontrast uh microcontrast is very powerful little tool here so you you want to be judicious with it so we have our contrast on 16. i'm gonna let dxo take care of the microcontrast uh clearvue plus that is a very powerful little filter too i don't really like what it does to water necessarily in foreground i do like what it does to backgrounds let's see what it does to this image not bad makes the whole image really pop right there and i think i'll just in this case i will leave it on this entire image so we'll just leave clearview plus at what 25. a lot of times if i like something at a certain level i'll use all i'll notice that level and then bring it down a bit so if i like that at 25 i'm going to bring it down to 20. and i'm so we have the unit form so just uniform uh smart lighting which is straight across the screen but we have this little birdie here which is basically the focal point of this image so i'm going to go to spot weighted if i were to go to spot weighted wall there was a person there there was a very good chance that dxo would detect the person's face and apply proper lighting to their face in this case there's a bird there and dxo is not detecting the bird so we're going to click on the spot uh spot weighted tool here we're gonna we can zoom it over if you need to we're gonna just going to click and hold put a nice little square over this bird and now the spot-weighted lighting knows it's going to light up this side of the bird here now if you got it wrong you can just come right here go right click that little x and start over perhaps you don't want any spot weighted or maybe uh you'd like to put the emphasis maybe on this rock right here where a crab might be sitting now you can see it is a put light emphasis on the side of the rock maybe i just want to bring out some detail so for whatever reason i want to use the tool i can just light the whole rock if i'd like and just bring out detail in that rock so in this case i don't think i'm going to need it so much i think i'll just apply it to uh this back of the bird here because the front of the bird you can see is already almost blowing out so let's just throw some on the back of the bird and we will be done with that so let's see we've done a contrast some clear view plus two uh two very powerful filters right there smart lighting we've been through that if i wanted to increase the smart lighting of course there are the preset it's just basically slight medium strong and then you can adjust the filter if you'd like and increase it yourself so we'll just leave it right there and we're going to get them into our what they call a selective tone which are all very familiar adjustments we'll bring the highlights down and while we're working with highlights we can just go ahead and take a look at our shadow and highlight detection the shortcuts for shadow and highlight detection uh would be control b for your shadow and for highlights control w and as you can see it engages those of course since i took this picture myself the exposure is relatively okay but uh you could the easy way to remember those would be uh control b so black for shadows and then w would be white so ctrl w for highlights white anyways that's how i remember them so uh shortcuts and we can just go ahead and bring our shadows straight up to a point we're happy with i've got some detail coming out of this rock here looks pretty good at 22. i will figure out where my midtones want to be looking pretty happy and there is your auto veneer this is not a vignetting tool by the way this is you cannot add a vignette with this tool this is not what it is about it is basically removing any vignetting that was applied or by or added by your lens or whatever happened when you took the picture there let us move on to the next tab here which is your color tab hey let's back up to light by the way did we ever add a gradient to our top no we didn't so what i want to do is just work on that sky i completely forgot about our sky so let's work on that we're going to add our first local adjustment here which involves using a control point so using control points is really really easy do not be intimidated by control points we're going to go to local adjustments and because right now you'll see these feathering all this at the top is because i am in erase mode so it's offering me this but if you right click on that you can see i'm in erase mode these are all your tools if you have any questions you can just hit right there and brings up this box to explain the shortcuts to these tools but let's just go back and we are going to in this case select a gradient why am i selecting the gradient well because this picture has a flat horizon so this flat horizon there's no buildings there's no trees it's not busy at all it's an excellent excellent use for a gradient it's just a perfect perfect reason to use a gradient so let's right click on this gradient tool i'm going to go right to the top here and left click i'm going to bring the gradient down actually i think i'm just gonna back up there and let's start from all right there and bring it down and now we'll just take our exposure down a bit yeah and now while we have this gradient in place we can do a number of things we can use any other tools so whether we want to add color to the sky contrast to the sky we can make any local adjustments that this gradient is currently covering so in fact we can do one more and that we can actually and you can't do this with any other gradient i'll tell you what uh we can actually go to erase and we can erase any part of the gradient we want so we can actually go in here increase our brush size and literally if you don't like your gradient down in your water we can just erase the gradient right here isn't that fun i can't think of any other we can erase it off our mountains even so we'll just get rid of the gradient that is uh kind of dampening our already dampened hazy mountains man it doesn't have to be perfect so there you go i just uh erased whatever gradient was on our water and we'll go ahead and we can add some more color to our skies and we'll just saturate them i don't normally i'm not a big fan of saturation but go ahead and add some vib more vibrancy there to our skies i don't remember if we no we haven't used the color panel yet i don't think so just adding to our skies i'm going to just bring the temperature the kelvin down two of our sky just to blue it up a bit that's nice and i really have no interest in sharpening skies so i'm just going to leave that just like that and uh it's not amazing how many things you can just do with a gradient whether you want to erase the gradient add color sharpen whatever you want to do one gradient and we've pretty much doctored our skies up so let's move on here and we have our color panel and we'll just start by adding some vibrancy some global vibrancy to the entire image i already added some vibrancy into our sky and some saturation and we're just going to add some more i don't see why not in this case it doesn't seem to be having any negative effects so let's just keep going here are birds looking really good i'm liking the yeah what i see so far let's go down what i'm worried about here is uh this is the color wheel and we will go over that very very powerful basically it's just like hsl you're going to just pick whatever tone you want to affect and you can change the the tonals of that tone you can adjust that that color the tones of that color as you want using this wheel save that for another day i want to just bring the temperature down just about like that more like how i saw it a little bit cooler beautiful beautiful moving back up to the top we move to the basically sharpness panel and you can see right here without me touching anything chromatic aberrations is already checked off as a default and if you remember the vignetting was already checked off as well you can see that the intensity uh is set to its own level it's taking care of everything i am a micro four third shooter so this is not really a noisy image you can see but just for kicks and for cleanliness and fun i think i will just go ahead and use the prime d noise just kind of do that as a standard if i can if i see fit let's talk about sharpness remember dxo does sharpen your image according to the optics of your lens you have optic lens modules there so it is sharpening even the uh the lesser sharp areas of your lenses which is uh the edges so you have a very sharp center of a lens but the edges of a lens tend to be less sharp than the other errors of the lens so dxo is you know taking special care of these areas to make sure your image looks optimal however you do have a global sharpening tool that you can't take advantage of and we'll just move that up i don't want to make it too crispy so we'll just move that at maybe 90 80. a friend of mine uses 150. i just kind of hold back because uh oftentimes i will bring images into say luminar later on and tweak it there so i just kind of tend to hold back on the sharpening very very judicial judicial judicial you know what i'm trying to say let's tweak the details just a little bit if you move down you can also see within the sharpening tools unsharp mask not really recommended for editing raw images arm sharp mask it's not actually sharpening it's not an actual sharpening tool but it is more of a illusion a pixel illusion that gives the impression or the the perception that an image like a jpeg that has been heavily compressed already is being sharpened um so i tend to stay away from that m sharp mask and we'll just uh skip that all together so this is looking really nice so far uh what we can do i don't really see any need to yeah i was going to uh maybe just do a little work on the side here but what we'll do is we'll just go back over to light and i'm wondering if there's any detail to be had right here and so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to bring the exposure down completely and it doesn't look like there's really anything there to be had at all so that said i'll just bring this back up to where we started and we'll just leave that bird happily at the original exposure might take a second to adjust portable computer here oh you know why it's because i uh yeah here we go so we have our bird back excuse me there guys and uh basically as you can see there was really no detail to be gained from the uh lowering the exposure on that so we'll just leave that we use our shortcuts to turn that uh highlight detection off uh i uh basically like what i see i don't see any reason to uh to tweak anything else if there were a uh say well let's go to before we get into that let's just go over to uh geometry and quickly discuss if we needed to crop and in this case i don't see any reason to crop anything if you were going to crop it here's your crop tool and you put you in crop mode by bringing this little box down here you have your basically default you know presets there and in constrained would just be the same as free so you can just select your own crop but in this case we are not going to crop anything uh and we are going to take a quick look well we didn't do any control points so we're not really going to look we did one control point and that is what this really module is all about so just for kicks let's do a control point so we can watch one go in right here to do that really you need to go into local adjustments mode once more now really quick the rule of thumb with control points is that when you're using them you always want to right click and add a new mask layer if you do not add the new mask layer the new control point you add will be connected to the first control point you added so if you add a control point and fail to add a mask layer the next control point you add will immediately take on the same edits and and apply the apply the exact same edits as that first control point and anything you do to that first control point from then on will take effect on that second control point and if you fail to add a new mask at that point and add a third a fourth a fifth a six all those control points will take on the same edits and be controlled by the very first control point until you add a new mask layer that is the rule however gradients are different gradients are completely separate and do not require a new control point or excuse me a new mask layer that said i you just saw me apply a new mask layer anyways let's just go ahead and right click because i really want to show you how uh this fills up with different control points so we're just going to right click on this and we're just going to hit control point and we're just going to add some phony control points right here so here's one now if you've never used uh dxo before what you're looking for is tones i think i went over this in uh in a another tutorial here so say this part of the sky i still think is a bit too white or i want to bring some color i want to try to get some blue in this part of the sky what i would do is um i would just place this on the tone that i want to change in that area there and then i'm just going to pull this out to the area i want to affect it now all i have to do is just bring this up to the tool i want and then just bring it down and you can see it affecting that area a little bit heavy-handed so now you have a control point so now that this control point is there if i were just to go over and just click on something else it'll automatically apply this exposure change to that area so say i decide this area needs the same thing you can see once i click boom it just did it automatically because these are connected now if i were to go over here and raise the exposure you can see both areas are are raising in unison so you basically have little dimmer lights you just applied i've seen no reason to do it for this but we're going to go ahead and just keep adding control points so we're just going to right click new layer and i'm going to put a control point here and i'll just shut that down and i'm going to go new layer and put one here one here and a new layer i think this rock might do good with the control point who knows what we might do with that and connect the rock to this whatever little bird up here because we might want to bring him out another one here and connect that new so we're making a big mess here as you can see we have stuff flying everywhere how are we going to keep track of all this now to keep track of it first of all you're going to be you're going to need to be in local adjustments if you are not in local adjustments and you are just looking at your image like this and say you're doing this and that and you want to look at well let's look at what i have here in control points you can go and it's not doing anything you need to be in local adjustments so put yourself in local adjustments once you are there you see all this but you're thinking oh wow you can just easily hover over any of this so it's listed graduated filter hover over any of these and it'll show you those are grouped there's your three group remember the insane i was attaching the rock to the clouds to the clouds and you can see all the insanity you put on your picture laid out right there it shows you very easily so you can easily just isolate that control point and there it is so you can work on it there's the three control points so you can work on it you can also uh just click on something and uh disable it you can duplicate it all that from right here you can control this you can just delete a control point so we can just delete that delete that delete that or i could just right click on it and delete it that way so this is a very important tool once you get into your work and that things get you know more complicated images where you're doing a lot of adjustments and things like that uh big lifesaver and save you from getting very very confused before we uh head out here let's talk about watermarks in this day and age of digital theft and thievery the watermark tool is very very easy to use you can just look at it and figure it out basically if you have your own preset watermark you want to use something that you some pdf or something somewhere you have you can just click on image and just hit browser bring up your browser and find it bring it in and you will use the same scale settings that you're going to see me use for my own that i'm going to enter i like to use the dxo watermark just text tool so just click on text now i'm just going to enter my channel name if i get my glasses on here and can see what i'm doing and once that is in place you can just go down and pick your font i have already chosen my favorite font which is in my case bakery you can choose your color i generally go with black or white but hey it's a big big world if you want to choose uh some sort of pastel or another color feel free to however you want to do your thing is your thing anyways i go with a black and white i think white looks really good with this picture here you have a schematic in which you can rotate the watermark so if you wanted to put it like that for instance which i think looks really good or you want to do just put it on the side maybe some might think that that looks pretty cool you can just kind of scale it down personally i prefer to put it just uh like that upside down no actually i like it uh just straight on the bottom kind of small once it's uh down there i prefer to bring down the opacity a bit so that it's not quite so bold and in your face just make it look a little more natural like that then i will bring it just a bit away from the bottom floor and just a little bit away from the right side wall not that far just about that far so it looks natural and if you don't think it looks natural then you will have to apply your own sense of natural to it as you can see you can create your own little presets so if you want to do that as far as how you like your uh your watermarks overlays uh it's wonderful anyways feel free to experience just a mat it becomes a matter of creativity from here guys so we just won't go into it feel free to explore the watermark tool uh moving on let's get out of a little adjustments here and uh if you look at other videos you can see how various local adjustment tools work like auto mask and mask things like that the really the mind frame is that ladies and gentlemen you're looking for tones uh so you're looking for tones that you want to change you're looking for us a white or a not a bright area and you're just telling the dxo and encircling that area and it's bringing that whole area of all those tones down at once and the beauty is that it feathers all this into everything around it so so your images never have an uneven look to them because everything is constantly being feathered into what's around it within that that circle your that circular area you see it's really genius once you get used to it you just really go wow this is quick and and just to me it's really genius so let's talk about as we get out of here um we haven't even got into the repair function the repair function is just amazing because it gives you so much control over what you want to erase and how you want to erase things you can actually feather your race you can pick areas to because remember when you erase something what's really going on is it's just replacing it with something else that looks like that area that you're trying to to get rid of so in dxo's case when you erase something uh you can actually pick if you don't like what it picked you can go select your own area and then just use whatever you want we'll get into that on another day because it's getting really long get the demo of this uh of this editing program you'll really like it mess with it uh if you have any questions hit me up in the comment box let's talk about how we're gonna get this picture out of here what you can do and what i generally do if you wanna use another application you can export to application currently dxo does not support any other third parties other than the nik collection and flickr and export to lightroom as you can see but as far as a full plug-in back and forth use it's not happening so you export to disk and that'll export your jpeg tiff whatever you want to do there or in my case sometimes i'll export to luminar for instance add any creative touches towards the end and i like the way luminar does skies and some just some easy hit ups uh i like luminar for so in this case uh we would be just uh exporting to [Music] disk and basically that would be the end of it and that is a basic edit uh did we did i tell you yeah i told you the beginning where does this edit go though now that it's done so say i send this image to my documents where did dxo put the information for this edit and it's super easy uh it just put the same number as the raw file on the metadata file and stuck it right next to the same where you found the picture and to me that is so perfect because i mean that just makes sense i mean where you put the picture is where you would expect to find things related to the picture so if you found the picture in my vacation 1992 you're gonna find the edit information in my vacation 1992 right next to that raw image that or the picture that you edited i don't know if that works maybe some people really don't like that workflow for me that workflow works absolutely perfect i'm just a big picture guy i like to i like to know where everything is and see it all from that view thanks for hanging out guys that is a another dxo edit and i will see you next time

Channel: Paul Bertsch Photography

Views: 2,201

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Id: fveeAlHkp7s

Length: 36min 49sec (2209 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021