Photolab and Lightroom Users?

DxO PhotoLab
1

Hi all:

I’ve watched a few tutorials on Lightroom and I’d like to give it a try just for the heck of it. I use PL currently and I like it. I just want to see how I do with another program (as I’ve only ever used PL). I don’t want to give up DeepPrime though!

Does anyone on here use both products together? If so, what is your workflow? Any other thoughts are appreciated. Thanks.

2

I use both. Most of the processing occurs in PL. Given that at least for me; PL does not show you the final image until it is saved. I send a TIFF file to lightroom. I find lightromm easier (more intuitive) to remove twigs/grass in my bird photography which is 90% of the photography that I do.

Regards

Charles

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3

Hi,
I don’t know if it might be useful, but here you have my full workflow:

SD card → copy to disk → culling in LR → demosaicing + denoising in PL → back to LR for the real editing phase → export to TIFF 16 bit → final editing in PS.

• I don’t do culling in PL because I prefer LR (faster, more options…)
• I do demosaicing & denosing in PL by creating a linear DNG
• Photoshop is for the final touches (clone/repair, liquify, advanced luminosity masks, LUTs, frequency separation for portraits).

Ian.

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4

That is very helpful. Thank you. A couple of questions:
Is it pretty easy going back and forth?
When you import into PL I assume you turn off all presets?
As PL does the denoising on export, you’re just exporting as DNG and then opening in LR?

Thanks!

5

You have to pay close attention to what files you are creating/using and what colour spaces they are using. If you build up a standard workflow like @Ian78 that becomes less of an issue over time. If you do it occasionally, like me, you can suddenly come to realise that you’ve been working on the wrong file or sometimes wonder why the colour doesn’t look right.

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6

For some reason, I can’t get the plugins working…

Would this work:

Import into PL then export as DNG with denoise and optical correction only.
Import into LR for editing and export as final.

Would the DNG the same as the RAW file (but with just those corrections)? I’ve never used a DNG before.

7

Yes, this would work and the DNG is different than the RAW file, because:

  • denoising and optical corrections have been applied, which might change the aspect ratio of the image, depending on whether you want to preserve the original aspect ratio (and lose some pixels as a trade-off) or not;
  • the DNG file contains demosaiced RGB data instead of R, G, G, B data, which is why the file is bigger too… Read more about RGB DNGs (linear DNGs) here.
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8

Would it also work if I did all the work in LR first, export DNG to PL and then did denoise correction?

9

PhotoLab wants an unaltered raw file for best results, and the high end denoising options are only available to raw files too.

The way to go is really to do denoising and optical corrections and save the result as DNG. Then, you import those DNGs with Lightroom.

I advise to use the export to disk option. Export to Lightroom can be sluggish, as can be roundtripping the files from Lr to DPL and back due to some issues with the current plugins.

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10

Those DNG files are huge! I’ll probably only do this process on really noisy files. Otherwise I’ll probably be deleting a lot DNG files after I’m done editing.

11

Hi

I only answer the first hypothesis;

Generally, users who are used to another software are afraid to abandon it.
You have the chance to know only PhotoLab, do not change anything :wink:
I do this.

Pascal

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I load to LR as it has very good catalouging, keywords, metadata and indexing. Also culling and grouping. Also I can upload web galleries directly from LR. The mapping and printing facilites are usefull. I use PL for denoising and other adustments. and then back to LR for storing and catalouiging.
The BIG problem for me is PL does not propelry support DNG (there ar elots of other threads on this)

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13

BTW, a while ago I was surprised by how a linear DNG created in PL, then exported into LR, was able to better handle my editing compared to the original RAW.

My image was an R5 RAW file, and when lifting the shadows in LR, the DNG from PL was able to “lift more” without showing any noticeable noise, while the original RAW was showing heavier noise all along when lifting the shadows.

The image was just 400 ISO. So, what I learned, is that using PL is not only great if you already have a noisy image (e.g. a night shot at 12800 ISO), but it’s also an excellent choice to prevent noise to appear while editing (as I said, like trying to lift the shadows…)

Ian.

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