I think I wouldn’t be too fair away from reality to state most people come to Photolab to get away from Adobe’s subscriptions but the reality is that yearly paid for updates are just a subscription in essence whether they are discounted or not.
Granted. You don’t have to upgrade but ‘if’ you do.
I will skip PL6 as for me, my use case and the camera system I use it as of yet offers nothing over 5.
And that’s an issue in my eyes for DxO, because unless something major gets added to PL6 I won’t look again until PL7 but by that point Adobe may (but probably won’t!) have brought Fuji demosaicing upto the standard of PL or close enough that I no longer feel the need to do my round trip.
I know there are plenty of fans of how PL does masking but LRc masking is on another level in the latest update, at least in my opinion and is much faster to achieve what I need and I think they, DxO, need to really start moving into the automated masking side of things.
Personal use case and opinion granted.
Another little point of contention I have with the non subscription you only pay once thing is that’s great so long as the company doesn’t move the goal posts or decide they don’t want to ‘fix’ something rendering that paid for software useless.
I bought Nik 2. Ultimately used it very little. Now I can’t use it at all because of a bug I presume in the installer. It states something along the lines of OS must be version 10.xx or higher. Well yep version 12 and now 13 are higher than 10 but nope. Installer says no.
I’ve seen there’s a possible work around mentioned in the forum but people shouldn’t be having to edit registry’s and stuff to get something to work imo.
I know new software doesn’t have to be backwards compatible all the way back but I would expect it to be largely working going forward, but this won’t install due to what I can only assume is a faulty installer that is incorrectly identifying version numbers. Or can’t count past 10!
Anyway. I’m going off topic!
TLDR: I agree yearly upgrades are not great and 2+ year with considerable updates would be better. IMO and all that.
I own Photolab 4 and last year I was very disappointet about Photolab 5, that offered nothing of interest for myself. Now the situation with Photolab 6 is the same and I’m forced to update, when I don’t want to pay the whole price next year. Furthermore I own Viewpoint 3 and the changes in Viewpoint 4 are minimal.
Although there is a discount, I’m refusing to update to Photolab 6. If I count the costs for Affinity 2 and if I would update Photolab and Viewpoint, I would have to pay 162 euro. People, who own the Nik Collection have even higher costs.
But the problem are not the costs, the problem is the missing progress of your products. I want to say, that I will rather buy a Lightroom/Photoshop code for 80-90 Euro during the Black Friday week, than giving money to you. Two years ago I wanted to support you, but now I’m dissapointed and giving money to Adobe seems to be the better deal for now.
And that’s worrying, if the people even with Black Friday discount refuse to buy your product.
For 3 cycles I waited for usability improvements, most notably a proper keyboard controllable interface but it just doesn’t happen and I am not going to believe it will happen in the next release either. I will vote with my wallet this time.
But we all know this won’t happen because of how this works nowadays. Do a yearly minimal feature release and have a predictable recurring revenue. Give too much and you will hurt yourself the next year. Only when there is real competition this behavior will change but it seems anyway that nobody is interested in photography anymore. From my point of view, the puck hasn’t really moved since Aperture came out. Yes, there is AI and things like Topaz… and yes denoising has improved. But a photo editor that is a complete package (e.g. Culling, Editing, DAM) with modern look and feel and great performance simply doesn’t exist today. But look at something like DaVinci Resolve and you see where the money is. Great feature set, good performance, tons of innovation, reasonable price (free or 500 euro once and lifetime updates) and a relatively happy community.
Also Adobe gets a lot of slack with the subscription model but I think they do quite a good job in regular updates. There recent masking upgrades are really solid and save me tons of times in my workflow. Their basic image quality and color control is among the worst of the pack, but that’s fixed with PhotoLab/PureRaw conversion + RNI Film profiles that emulate old film stocks and give wonderful results with PL/PR processed files.
@Blemerou this is a user forum - so you don’t give any of us particpants any money I understand your complaints, but the majority of us can’t do anything about it.
But if you save twice the costs of an update, you eventually could afford the full price of PL, if that’s more attractive to you when it comes out next autumn? So, you don’t loose lot money by not updating twice, I guess.
Last year I have updated, but to be honest, the only practical feature that was new in PL5 over PL4 that I have been using was the capability to rename files . Now, I don’t see anything that would convince me to switch to PL6. Let’s hope for PL7.
A feature that would make me update would be improved masking. Automatically create masks for detected persons etc. Also the possibility to use all tools on masks. I was really expecting to be able to use the hsv tool on masks in PL5, but that unfortunately never happened.
This is a very sensible request and it’s a real shame that DxO has not heard us on this issue (ability to add external hardware and external macros via an API). It’s a relatively easy request and would make many, many users happy and would persuade more hardware manufacturers to integrate with (and effectively, market) PhotoLab.
If you are on a Mac you can change the keyboard shortcuts with Keyboard Maestro.
Personally I’m excited about better repair tools but was really waiting for support for mobile DNG. Frustrating not to be able to properly use PhotoLab on my iPhone RAW images.
DxO appears to have decided to pocket the VAT fee for VAT paying European businesses. I will probably buy nothing this year as a consequence of the Customer Alienation policies.
When the discounts were 50% I was more willing to overlook the VAT issue.
I had €153 of software in my basket. These tax shenanigans are basically illegal in Europe. European intra-country commerce rules are very clear. More self-destructive behaviour by DxO, hélas.
Yes, but it does magic with scanned negatives.
Since PL doesn’t let me use Prime N.R. on a non raw files ( ot even tiff or dng) I have to find a tool that will give me a solution for non raw . So Topaz is not instead of PL, it’s a complementary solution next to PL.
Right now Nik Define & pro sharpener (by Google) gives me a decent results. But Topaz does it much better. The same with my galaxy S21 indoor images.
I’m a PhotoLab 4 user that didn’t see any reason to upgrade to PL5 and am on the fence for upgrading to PL6 at this price. I know I would have to buy this upgrade to be eligible to upgrade to PL7 or PL8 without starting over buying the full version. But the full version PhotoLab isn’t all that much more expensive than two upgrade versions, so maybe it’s smarter to wait and see if DxO will develop improved features I care more about than what they’ve worked on the past two years.
I think the specialized app Topaz Photo AI is really competing with DxO Pure Raw, at least in terms of quickly reducing noise and sharpening Raw images, more than DxO PhotoLab. (Photo AI can also work on JPGs.) Photo AI is still on version 1, and this app will very likely get steadily better over the next year or two, because that’s what Topaz does with their new apps. Photo AI can already do remarkably well with many lower-res, older digital images, and digital scans of film images or negatives. Sometimes it’s jaw-dropping good with those images. Other times it misses. I ran a group shot that was fuzzy all-around through Photo AI; the faces of half the people looked fantastic, and the other half came back looking like gargoyles. Overlapping faces in particular completely threw it, but even some non-overlapping faces were made worse for no obvious reason. Refine brushing also needs more attention, but I think it will get there. With newer Raw images, neither Topaz Photo AI or DxO Pure Raw is yet as effective for me at doing just optical corrections, noise reduction, and sharpening as DxO PhotoLab Elite + Topaz Sharpen AI if more sharpening is needed for me.
I haven’t tried Capture One or some of the smaller ones, but the one complete photo processing app I have used that has improved very nicely the last few years and is now making me question if I really want to continue subscribing to Adobe or upgrading DxO as well is On1 Photo Raw 2023. With the minor-version upgrade that came out this past week, On1 improved their ability to quickly refine Super Select AI significantly. I get that some PhotoLab users don’t like AI processing, but the wave is building out there, and as it gets increasingly accurate, you’ll be able to get so much done so much faster. On1 Photo Raw as a complete photo processing app that doesn’t need exports to other apps to finish processing, usually, is now a better buy than DxO PhotoLab Elite in my opinion, but of course your mileage may vary. It’s worth a trial if you haven’t checked it out.
When I try to purchase from Slovakia, with a company which has VAT registration (which is in my account records), there is no VAT reduction. Because of your post, I went through to the Paypal checkout and the Visa checkout. The amount DxO attempts to take is the full amount without any VAT reduction.
I’ve pretty much had enough of the customer alienation policies at this point, along with the nickel & diming. Change the Black Friday structure, steal the VAT, refuse to give refunds to unhappy customers (not me, I’m happy with the software but I don’t like to see it done to others for no useful purpose), refuse to offer automatic upgrades to recent purchasers (two months or less would at least be somewhat fair).
Somebody is running this business very poorly and in a customer-hostile way. I wish whoever it is would stop and get some better advice on how to nurture customers and a community.
Interesting. I am a Capture One user, but I have stayed up to date with DxO for more than a few versions. Recently, I ran a comparison of the two programs. PhotoLab cannot be topped for its camera/lens corrections and noise reduction, but Capture One still comes out ahead in terms of final image quality, user interface and workflow. Which is why I often use both programs in a complimentary fashion. It’s nice to have both, but if I were forced to choose only one, it would be C1.
Since Slovakia is an EU country and France is an EU country, you are obliged to pay VAT in France but you can then reclaim it in Slovakia. The only time you can purchase without VAT in the source country is if that country is outside of the EU.
Noise reduction: yes. Camera/lens correction: Maybe not true anymore. I recently compared C1 and PL in terms of correction and in aspect of distortion correction, PL failed on a Nikon 14-30/4 Z. A horrible distortion of the lens was very much improved by both apps, but the inbuilt Nikon profile read by C1 did a better job… Of course, a lens profile is not only distortion and who knows if the lens PL used to correct it is not better or worse than mine?
My takeaway is: Noise reduction is a big reason to use PL, lens correction less so, especially since new lenses always come witha waiting time and at the same time, lens producers rely more and more on lens profiles - so, the profiles are in dire need.
The company Lensrentals is testing lenses for resolution, if they can test a batch of 10 copies. And no lens is performing exactly like another and that’s only one aspect of lens quality. Although I doubt the differences would show up easily outside of their lab. But here as well: If PL is using one single lens to set up correction parameters who tells me they might have got a lemon?
But working with both, I find the .DNG support of Capture One lacking, especially with regard to saving if metadata. I always get uses with keywords ghosting and such. But lately I am switching to a metadata-less workflow and only do the tagging in the output phase (so basically once the output product goes into my photo library manager of choice).
I understand your complaints, but the majority of us can’t do anything about it.
. Now, I don’t see anything that would convince me to switch to PL6. Let’s hope for PL7.
