It’s hard to describe but it makes it fairly simple to, say, target the yellows in your photo to warm them up, and the greens to darken them, and the reds to fade them, and with care, leave the orange and blue and pink alone. ![]() You can select a range of colours on a colour wheel and process this range in your photo with adjustments to saturation, luminance, and colour. The ingenuity of this tool is in its interface. The final processing feature I will highlight is the HSL colour wheel. PhotoLab’s implementation is very good and possibly the best I’ve seen. PhotoLab’s ClearView Plus is a “de-hazing” tool which cuts through hazy images to bring clarity and depth of colour back. The next feature is becoming common in image processing but, again, not all are created equal. It’s not magic but it can make a moderate noise problem disappear and a heavy noise problem look far more acceptable. Informed by the Optics Modules, it performs complex, multi-phase de-noising at the first step in the image processing chain - in the case of RAW images, on the RAW data itself. PhotoLab 3 has the PRIME noise reduction engine which is the best I’ve seen. Most image processing software will offer noise reduction but not all are created equal. The next unique capability is noise reduction. The level of sharpness achievable is remarkable. I got such great results with new photos that I went back and revisited some old favourite images that I knew were some of my best and have been startled to find they can be made even better with PhotoLab. The chances of a module you need being available are pretty good - there are over 42,000 of them. If there is an Optics Module to match what your photo was taken with, then you’ve automatically got the best image from which to start making your editorial choices. Each is based on laboratory testing of that actual equipment. PhotoLab has this knowledge built into what they call Optics Modules.Įach Optics Module, which is downloadable on-demand from within PhotoLab, contains the characteristics of a camera-and-lens combo which enables the software to automatically correct distortion, vignetting, aberration, sharpness, and more. The logical way to get the best out of your camera is to understand its strengths, weaknesses, and foibles. Next, we come to photo processing and this is where PhotoLab 3 shines. There does appear to be some amount of caching, but it is no slouch when rendering thumbnails anyway, managing about two per second on my low-end Mac mini. PhotoLab does not have a database of thumbnails, rather it generates them on the fly as you view folders. You can also create Projects which are logical groupings of photos independent of their folder location. For convenience, you can move files between folders within PhotoLab. In fact, a core principle of PhotoLab is that it will never touch your original files. The basic management of photos is “by reference.” PhotoLab lets you put your photo files where you want and it will not move them unless you say so. It should also be noted that any exports can, and by default do, contain the keywords. Because Lightroom could write them to my files, that means PhotoLab can easily search my existing photos. PhotoLab can readkeywords out of files if they’re already there. There is discussion in the support forums about addressing this but so long as one remains with PhotoLab 3 it’s not a problem. I should note here that one weakness is all this metadata is stored in a database internal to the software and not in the photo files or other portable location. It supports pick and reject, star rating, projects, and - importantly for me - hierarchical keywords. It’s not up to the same standard as Lightroom, but it is good enough to get the job done. Let me tell you why I decided this is the software for me.įirst up, photo management - the DAM. I started a 30-day free trial and three weeks later I purchased it at the discounted launch price. I was looking again recently when I stumbled across the newly launched DxO PhotoLab 3. Those features were also promised, but I gave up waiting when a whole new version was released with “sexy” new AI features while still lacking some basics in the DAM functionality. ![]() Once the DAM arrived, it was passable but lacked key features I needed. At the time it didn’t have a digital asset management (DAM) capability, but it was promised. What was I going to do to manage and process my growing DSLR photo collection? Apple’s Aperture was hung out to dry, Adobe’s Lightroom changed to a subscription model, and Apple Photos started out and continues to be severely limited.
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