I am using PhotoLab3 Elite (Win) for my Sony ARW files. New files are recognized by PL3 and the geometric lens correction via DxO profiles works perfectly.
When I use a third-party DAM (iMatch 2021) the lens correction in PL3 doesn’t work anymore after saving my files from the DAM. iMatch uses Phil Harvey’s EXIFTool for writing the metadata.
I found out that PL3 seems using (only) the “exif:Software” tag (IFD0) to recognize which camera/lens profile has to be used. iMatch/EXIFTool uses “exif:Software” tag (IFD1) for that information. Do you see a solution from DxO for that problem?
Photolab plays fairly poorly with third party programmers in terms of metadata. Photo Mechanic is the goto metadata application for sports and event photographers and a big part of the multi-camera shoot wedding market as well. As an example, Photolab does not recognise the IPTC Headline/Title tag coming in from Photo Mechanic resulting in exports without the Headline/Title tag.
I wouldn’t wait for help from DxO with metadata issues as DxO have shown they don’t really want to co-operate in this field as they are still dreaming about the DAM they’d like to build into Photolab (please no, stick to RAW development and image retouching, that’s enough @StevenL)
In this case, re-exporting the jpegs with Photo Mill X mysteriously fixes the issue by resaving the metadata in the right format.
Cleaning the files with EXIFtool can also work. This is something you can work on yourself (there’s lots of documentation) or try to hire someone with the correct expertise. Moving the data back into the right place would not be too difficult.
On reflection, the developer at fault here is iMatch. Photolab processes the RAW files correctly. iMatch is removing important information and putting it in a different format. That’s an iMatch problem not a DxO problem`
Thank you for your comment. I contacted iMatch in the first place but we couldn’t solve the problem. Contacting the EXIFTool forum solved the problem: A “-” at the wrong place of a script … (for details see XMP2EXIF writes the value from "exif:software" only to IFD1 and not to IFD0)