Life is full of surprises

Those who have read some of my latest posts know that I have been using Dxo as a pseudo PureRAW, using only the PureRAW adjustments and creating a dng file for use in a pixel editor.

I had (ha, ha) assumed that Dxo with the same adjustments would produce the same final image as PureRAW, but that turns out to not be correct. The two apps do NOT produce the same result, at least as dngs.

Here is a sample composite image with the Dxo output on the left and the PureRAW output on the right. In this case the Dxo output has better contrast and color and I believe is a better interim image, but in some tests the DeepPRIME output was clearer and sharper with better color.

I am going to do this test again with jpgs just to make sure that the problem is not something to do with the dng outputs. It is too bad that PureRAW will not allow TIF outputs as I think that that would be a better test than using jpgs.

What do you have as the PL5 default preset? Can make a BIG difference.

I had been using the Standard, but I think the idea here is that the only adjustments that should be made are those done in the DeepPRIME app, and those are just the 5 auto adjustments - denoise, distortion, lens sharpening, vignetting and chromatic aberration. The standard preset makes changes to the image and because of that I changed the default preset to No Corrections.

I am trying to reproduce the same output as DeepPRIME using PL5, so I think it should be set up the same as DP.

I am perfectly willing to change the standard preset and run the test again if you think it will make any difference. And, BTW, the test using jps gave me the same result. The DP processing was generally sharper and clearer.

PhotoLab has an additional output setting: Optical corrections only (or something like that). This should closely do the same thing as DPR. Also, some guessing is needed about colour space…

And the results of the jpg test are not so different from those of the raw. The DeepRAW images are clearer and sharper, although I do not see the same contrast difference. In fact you have to look at the comparison at 100% or more to see the difference. See below.

I suppose that DeepRAW is using a different sharpening algorithm, perhaps in addition to the Lens Sharpness itself.

Yes. I puzzled over which one of the 2 dng selections to make, but I ended up assuming that Optical Corrections did not include stuff like vignetting, so I chose the other (All Corrections) assuming (ha, ha) that that meant all specified corrections, which would be the 5 adjustments selected.

I will do this all over again this afternoon using the Optical setting and see what that does. I would really like to be able to reproduce the DeepPRIME settings with Dxo as I am not going to spend $90 to get an app that does mostly the same stuff as PL5, only with fewer user options.

Sounds reasonable to me… You don’t need DPR if you have DPL. DPR can make sense for someone on a tight budget wanting to get DxO best in class functions with e.g. Lightroom or Affinity Photo etc.

Your terminology is confusing. Sorry, not being critical, but there is no such thing as “DeepRaw” and “DXO” could refer to either program. Please use PL5 and PR for clarity. :grinning:

Incidentally the “All Corrections” sets the WB where “Lens correction and NR only” leaves the WB in the sensor space of the camera. This could be the difference that you are seeing.

Use LCANRO with each of the 5 things you listed and DP enabled but not changed. I did this exact same test a few days ago and could see no difference between the outputs of PL5 and PR, even when examining them at 300%.

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> Your terminology is confusing.

Yes. That was my mistake. I used PR in labeling the layers in the editor but mistakenly specified DR in the post. Sorry about that.

> This could be the difference that you are seeing.

As it turns out, yes and no.

The DPR image and the DPL image, when generated using Optical and Denoise Only, generated images with slightly different geometry.

Here is the DPR image:

Here is the DPL image:

If you look carefully at the document hanging on the right wall you can see that more of it is visible in the PhotoLab version than in the PureRAW version, and so when I stacked the layers so I could compare the color and sharpness I had to manually move one so that they linked up properly.

PureRAW document:

PhotoLab document:

However, using only the Optics Only and Denoise setting I did not see any color or contrast differences, but I still see a slight sharpness difference. Other than the geometry and sharpness issues they did seem identical.

So some further investigation of the geometry differences between the DPL and DPR images show that my editor views the images as different sizes. That is, there is no horizontal image compression, but rather it recognizes the DPL image as being physically wider than the DPR image.

I have seen this before in how different images recognize different image sizes. The exif data for the original raw image is

ImageWidth : 5240
ImageHeight : 3912

For the DPR

ImageWidth : 5184
ImageHeight : 3888

and for the DPL output dng:

ImageWidth : 5385
ImageHeight : 3888

It seems odd to me that PhotoLab and PureRAW view the image sizes as being different and I would think that that is related to a slight difference in how they correct for distortion. However they are both using the same downloaded file for the same lens.

I must admit that I didn’t check for geometry differences, but you are correct about them. I haven’t tried this but in PL5 inside the Distortion Correction tool there is a checkbox for “Keep aspect ratio”. If you check that box I think the geometry will be the same.

As for sharpness: In PR under “DXO Optical Corrections” Click the “Global Lens Sharpening” to off. It’s not really off but will be the same as the unmodified setting of “Lens Sharpness” in PL5. This should fix the sharpness difference that you are seeing.

I will run the tests again today and see what happens.

> This should fix the sharpness difference that you are seeing.

Perhaps. I will see.

But the thing about the sharpness is that I think the images are clearer and better in the DPR processing because of the added sharpness. It does not look unnatural or over sharpened as it tends to do when I apply even a small amount of Unsharp Masking, so I would rather find a way to get DPL to add that sharpening rather than remove it from DPR.

Note: DPL sharpens images, even if the slider is set to “0”

Lens Sharpness ON - but set to ZERO, which means “automatic standard” rather than “none”

Lens Sharpness OFF

Okay, do it the other way around. Leave the Global sharpness in PR “On” and set Global in Lens Sharpness in PL5 up to 1.

BTW turn Unsharp Mask off completely. It is only there to be used if there is no lens module for your lens.
Repeat: Use Lens Sharpness alone with Global sharpness set to 1.00. No Unsharp Mask.

DPR has 2 on/off switches, one for global lens sharpening and one for lens distortion. Those correspond to the DPL settings of Distortion and Lens Sharpness. When processing DPR I use both and when processing DPL I use both, but the results are different with the DPR output being a bit sharper and a bit clearer.

What I would want to do is somehow get DPL to produce images as sharp as DPR but if I adjust the settings for either Distortion or Lens Sharpness I lose the auto setting and thus the ability to properly adjust different images automatically.

Using unsharp masking or even some sharpening specific plugins after processing to fix this issue generally only creates enough extra noise and/or halos that it is not worth the trouble.

I am going to continue testing, including generating tiffs in DPL, to see if there is any way to address this issue.

First, I do NOT have unsharp masking set on in DPL when doing this processing. I have only the 5 adjustments - Denoise, Distortion, Lens Sharpness, Vignetting and Chromatic Distortion. And, as I mentioned above, if I turn Global Sharpness to 1 it may fix this issue, but it will mean a fixed value rather than an automatic adjustment for all images.

Still I will give it a try in my testing and see what happens. It is still cold outside and I am staying inside anyway …

It’s cold here too Mike, great day for a fire, coffee and editing! :smiley:

I was responding to your statement above about Unsharp Mask. UM wouldn’t come through the export to DNG Optical Corrections and NR Only process.

What I was trying(and I think succeeding :grin: ) to do was to make your PR edits and PL5 edits match. If you leave PR unchanged and increase Global to 1.00 in PL5(including the other changes that you’ve already made, like Aspect Ratio, etc.) the edits will match.

As for some sharpening setting that will give you the sharpness that you desire from any photo automatically; this doesn’t exist yet. PR doesn’t do this either.

I have gone through a series of tests using different outputs (TIF and DNG), different geometry settings and different Global Sharpness settings, and what seems to be the best fit to the existing DPR is when I use dng output files, set the Keep Aspect Ratio checkbox and set Global Sharpening to +1 (as you suggested). The images are almost exactly the same with only the slightest contrast difference. The match is so close that I would not have seen it had I not been stacking layers and switching the visibility on and off. Setting the Keep Aspect Ratio on solved the “problem” of different images sizes.

One of the interesting things that I noticed is that when I use a TIF output instead of the dng output in DPL the resulting image has a lot more “presence” in that the colors are a bit bolder and the contrast is a bit higher. I suppose this has to do with the fact that the pixel editor is not trying to automatically adjust the tif like it does the raw. It would be nice to try the comparison tif to tif but DPR does not allow me to produce a tif.

I don’t know that I will continue processing like this, but for the moment I expect I will use these settings to process the raw images into dngs for use in the pixel editor and see how that goes. That reduces DPL to a pre-processor for the pixel editor rather than a full photo editor and because of that I may not keep up this processing regime, but I will see how it all goes.

This has been both interesting and informative for me, and it is hard to beat that on a cold and nasty day when I don’t want to venture outside anyway.

Thanks for the help.

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DNG output has no colour space option (and is not applicable ). That is something for the app that is used to convert and render the DNGs to normal pixels …

White balance can be turned off , having no result in the output.

And at least for precious versions of Photolab, enabling or disabling white balance would have the exact same result when loading the DNG into Adobe Camera Raw.

It’s been a while since I did those tests on Photolab though… It might actually be called 'optics pro’s st that time :wink: