Some of DxO’s decisions look strange for us, who have not been a part of the decision taking process. Whatever we think of DxO’s release policies (and communications in that matter) for PhotoLab and Nik, yearly paid updates boil down to a hidden subscription for all who want the latest and greatest.
DxO offers try-before-you-buy, which gives us a 31 day opportunity to find out if the changes are worth the cost, checking things against our own requirements. We can then come to the conclusion that a) our requirements are not met, met or exceeded or b) “I just want it”, which is not really a conclusion
Hi, I’m with you there. None of these new features are really much help to me. I shoot Canon, and only use PL4 Elite for the DeepPrime and Lens Corrections / sharpening via ‘export’ from LR - the round-trip workflow is well integrated - I set a default preset in PL4 and then adjust to taste. I did try PureRAW but it lacks any control over the level of Lens sharpness applied which for a good many images is far too strong.
What also I am unhappy about is the upgrade price - I bought PL4 in mid-August so I don’t get it free (I asked - no exceptions apparently!). I will likely pass on this une despite the mildly advantageous pricing for upgrading before Nov. 14th. (£69.99 vs. £89).
As I expect to upgrade my camera in the New Year to a new model, I suspect I may be forced to upgrade anyway to get camera/lens support for it .
If you only use dxopl for it’s deepprime and optical modules there is no need to upgrade.
All the basics for creating a batchpreset are not changed.
Except maybe metadata managing which is now full read and write.
I was astonished by the speed of DP on MacBook Air M1. Not even it is almost 5 times faster, but it seems that Neural Engine has lower power consumption than GPU or even CPU. I haven’t measured it yet, and it’s just my personal opinion based only on the temperature of the MacBook Air after render of 30+ photos. This might be useful for travels.
I was so pleased, that I bought the upgrade just the second day of my trial version.
Big improvement? Where? Keywording is not exactly my understanding of a digital asset management and the photo library shows a lot of folders I don’t use in PhotoLab. The “projects” on the other hand are a rather poorly structured “management”.
At that moment my only reason to upgrade would be to support DxO’s work - so far I was not able to discover a real “need to have” benefit.
You mean “U-line” instead of “U-Point”? Didn’t miss that in the past as much as I miss a decent DAM. Admittedly, my “decent DAM” would look very much as that of ole’ Aperture, which means “that’s not gonna happen” – no one can bring Aperture DAM functions into an app which needs to run on Windows and Mac OS.
A DAM is reasonable easy to have seperate running and dxopl can read export only.
Nice to have but not mandatory right?
U-line, ? As far as i know the original thermology is u-point technology with controlpoints. They call it control point and control line.
Did you have test or used this feature?
They added on both, point and line , color and luminance selectivity.
Much more controlable in selecting a certain area.
No color selectivity (0) you get a luminosity mask.
No luminosity selectivity? You get a color mask.
And all variations.
Even a line and circulair gradient. ( with negatives to add. )
You can use them together or against each other.
Copy invert mask.
It’s a local and global adjustment tool.
I find it very powerfull and easy to use.
No offense, @OXiDant but I think it’s much better to not have a separate running (and coming from different software companies) independent DAM. And yes, a good DAM would be mandatory for me to pay the update. But I think, long-term DxO users already found their ways to organize libraries in their own way (as there’s practically nothing on DxO side helping much) and would not want to change their workflows. It’s just not mine.
And when it comes to selections, I never was much into U-points and actually prefer the more intuitive (and less clicks needed) way of Capture One. They called it “magic brush”. I tried the control line or whatever it’s called, it was nothing I would talk much about to friends.
No offence taken,
Every one has it’s own priorities.
I would manage in one app and fine tune on the fly in dxopl the missed parts and be happy. When managing in dxo starts to be on par i just fade out app 1.
Never used capture one so can’t say anything thoughtfull about it.
The only lans i can break is control line/point has a certain , maybe steep, learning curve to get the hang of it.
Just watch some tutorials or people who are exploring the feature and show his here on the forum.
It would be a waste to upgrade to v5 and not explore that feature.
Yes, but it would be more useful as a radial filter if there was also a feathering control like the repair tool which would allow you go from no feathering to 100%. and a boundary area where the feathering would start and end…
Upgrading for one single feature? I watched “some tutorials” and I’m not impressed. To me, there are much better ways to organize my pictures than to bugger around with keywording, but as you said
At the risk of sounding arrogant: I suspect that most of you guys never got in touch with simpler concepts to manage images than keywording and tons of folders on your harddrives. Intelligent folders? Groups>projects>albums?
Well, I enjoy the stability of PL and some nice features. Of PL4. PL5? No big progress to me. But I’m also no longer using my Fujis, so that feature doesn’t matter anyway. C1 also had ages to go until they could finally support lossless compressed Fuji RAW. What a waste of resources! 50 vs 33 MB, 50% more diskspace was needed to save uncompressed RAW for no real benefit.
I know @Joanna , sorry I replied @StevenL without quoting him. He wrote: “w/ control point and chroma/luma selectivity set to zero you can reach some nice results…”
When figuring out what were these new features within this upgrade I felt just as @zkarj described.
I am not quite sure what is the real improvement with the Refined control point masks. The great u point algorithm of nik was based on two sections:
Selection
Correction
While the reason why Nik U point technology still works good after decades was based on the relationship between the Selection and Correction algorithms.
Now "refining the selection mask without changing the Correction algorithm, I am not sure that it gives you an astonishing results.
Up till now I didn’t see any tutorial that shows the significant improvement in the final result while using the sliders.
Even as an EA member I was confused with the control lines and I assumed “it was me” that I did not understand the full capabilities of the new control points. But now I’m more convinced that it is not that brilliant feature.
Therefore my 2021upgrade was to buy Luminar AI (37$) which really extended my toolbox, and No, sky replacement isn’t my cup of tea. But color harmony, advanced contrast and some other AI tools not to mention the brilliant AI portrait tools.
Now I am more afraid that DXO even though they are the Masters in Optics ( glass) with supereb Raw Converter and Optic module, while Deep Prime is the best in market De-noising tool.
Nevertheless other PL adjustment tools are Copy Paste from Nik collection.
I am afraid that DXO PL package is in “stagnation” there will be no new major editing tools in the near future. Because DXO is like the student who copied and pasted his homework. They have this PL package but they don’t have the knowledge…
In Skylum on the other hand (Was founded on 2008, two years after DXO PL) It is vice versa.
They started all from scratch designing that image editing engines with the new technologies of 2020. They had their Try & Error (and still do) but now they have the knowledge they have the Know How and we will keep on getting new features i the next years.
Yes the workflow is going to be cumbersome using PL as raw converter + some other tools and then exporting to luminar as DNG and keep on editing.
Supporting DXO? Well now they are busy with expending their Users: Fujifilm users and/or Pureraw users. They don’t really need my upgrading support.
Now DXO, you can consider this post as complaints of a spoiled child or as a Wake Up Call.
It’s in your hands.
.
