Jay,
If perhaps you can explain your current workflow and why you feel DxO doesn’t fit well maybe someone here on the forum can probably help you :-).
I am unclear what you use use Bridge for if you are using the LR Catalog. Also, I have found it quite slick the way DxO PhotoLab Elite integrates with LR for RAW pre-processing (demosaicing and Lens Correction). So if I understood better what your issue is I may be able to suggest something.
Just in case someone arrives at this thread, as I did, because of problems with PhotoLab either adding or not adding previous Lightroom adjustments to a roundtrip file from LR to PL and back to LR, I have discovered something that is highly relevant to the issue.
First, as several posters noted above, any initial LR adjustments will only be part of the file sent to PL (as an XMP sidecar file) if you checked the XMP option in LR’s catalog settings (Edit > Catalog Settings > Metadata) to “Automatically write changes to XMP”. The LR Develop data is included there. Note that if you convert your RAW image files to DNG upon import into LR, as I do, then the Develop data will also be included in the DNG file if you check the XMP box.
Use the PL plugin within LR (File > Plug-in Extras > Transfer to DxO PhotoLab) to transfer the file to PL. Make your adjustments in PL. Now we arrive at the critical step when exporting from PL back to LR. Click the “Export to Lightroom” button, and an options dialog will pop up. Make your choice under “Action”; I usually select “Export as DNG (all corrections applied)”. Then under the “Include” drop-down menu, select “All” if you want everything, including your initial LR adjustments, to be included in that file. Those adjustments will then be applied when the file comes back to LR.
On the other hand, if you don’t want the initial LR adjustments to be applied, under PL’s “Include” menu select instead “None”, or “Copyright & Contact info only” or “Copyright only”. Then the file that is exported back to LR will contain only the PL modifications, and will not contain the initial Develop steps that were made in LR before sending the file to PL. So no Develop adjustments will appear back in LR.
Or, actually, you can make any choice in the PL Export Options “Include” drop-down, and then as long as you uncheck the Exif box below it, the exported file will not contain the initial Develop steps that were made in LR before sending the file to PL. The Exif box is the key to whether or not previous LR adjustments are carried back to LR.
Arien,
The “None” etc options don’t quite work if you have a camera default Import Preset set as that does get applied on return to LrC (as should be expected when Importing an image from any source in LrC).
Colin, thanks for that additional note. I didn’t test that preset situation. But as you say, this is behavior that you would expect, since from the file’s point of view this is a new Develop instruction that it sees upon importing back into LR, rather than Develop history that it carried with it to PL.
I suspect that your initial problem with the change in how the exported PL file handled previous LR Develop history was due to some inadvertent change that got made to PL’s LR Export options dialog. Any changes made there are sticky; once changed, they will remain that way until changed again. In your case, reinstalling PL probably set them back to a default state, so that it worked again as previously. Installation of a new version of PL inadvertently did a similar (but opposite) thing to me. But the information in this thread did help me figure out what had happened, and how to easily reverse it.
I really appreciate your in depth investigation and explanation. As you say the reinstall is probably what fixed my problem. But it’s good to better understand what’s going on under the covers so to speak. Many thanks.