agree 100%
For those who have advanced versioning requirements, I suggest exporting full size TIFFs (16-bit) and then creating versions with a dedicated tool. I’ve written a review of most image resizers available on OS X.
Should Photolab do everything that other tools do?
I think this is a difficult questions to answer.
From my standpoint all I would like at the moment from Photolab is more traditional Highlights slider
which doesn’t affects midtones so much.That’s all.
If I need some other features missing in Photolab I can use LR, C1P or Photoshop. If I wake one day and I would like to replace a sky it will be a matter of a few minutes – download Luminar and install and here we go. As simple as that.
If I’m correct DxO is not ‘’a few enthusiastic programmers sitting in a garage, eating sandwiches, drinking cheap coffee and writing a code for Photolab’’. As I understand DxO is a company and capitalistic owners of the company I work for are teaching us the main goal of a company is to make a profit for the owners. No profit – no company. As simple as that.
If DxO is a company they have a cleaners who clean offices at the end of a working day. They need to have a top programmers to work on Photolab. They also need to have other employees to do other things. I think we all know how company works. All of them are not going to work every day just because it’s fun. Perhaps some of them are but in general they go to work to get a paycheck.
And there are also the owners. We know what the owners want. A profit. What happens if there is no profit to feed the owners, to give employees a paycheck and to invest in development and new equipment?
In short; DxO needs to make money to feed the owners, pay employees, to pay all costs and invest in
development and new equipment.
Here is one option:
DxO is satisfied with the profit it makes at the moment and with the number of users it has at the moment. If this is true let Photolab stays as it is and all or majority of the users will be happy and they will buy new versions of Photolab. Let a few members of this forum dictates what Photolab should do and what not. If they decide Photolab does not need new features let so be it.
Here is the other option:
Let’s say DxO wants more profit so it can invest more in development. It can get more profit with raising the prices of DxO products or by getting more users.
I bet raising the price to much won’t go well. So better option is to get more users. The only problem is how. As I see ( I could be wrong) the majority of professional photographers are using Lightroom and Capture One. All the Youtube influencers are also using Lightroom and Capture One. Most of the Lightroom users who don’t like Lightroom any more are switching to Capture One.
Why?
Are Lightroom and Capture One better then Photolab? I would say not in quality. So why Lightroom and Capture One are so popular?
No matter what is the reason DxO needs to finds the answer and act so it will get more users. If DxO acts correctly he will keep existing users and get new users.
Now; tell me, what do you think DxO needs to do with Photolab so it will get more users and pro photographers and Youtube influencers will start using Photolab?
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I know what, but I’ll not tell here in public. DxO can contact me and we’ll establish a price for the knowledge 
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Partner with some of the DAM and image triage applications:
- PhotoMechanic (active partnership program, welcomes partners)
- FastRawViewer
- Apollo
- iMatch
- PhotoSupreme
Most of those developers would be happy to partner with a high quality RAW development tool which is not trying to push them out of business (Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Bridge, CaptureOne, Luminar) but supports just RAW development with full XMP roundtripping for any keyword changes. Adobe Photoshop and Iridient Developer and (partially) Photolab are the only serious RAW development tools I know of which work this way.
Not counting Affinity Photo as the RAW module is so muddy as to make it irrelevant as a RAW solution.
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Considering the direction PL4 has taken with the new DeepPrime technology, there must be benefits here that could be applied to panorama stitching, focus stacking and even HDR. It would be nice see such features in PL5 or PL6.
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Well, much will be accomplished if we could have direct support for Datacolor SpyderCheckr and a few other similar products in PhotoLab.
Some improvements to the file renaming tool is absolutely needed. Ideas can be grabbed from say Apple’s old Aperture.
Now that focus stacking is theoretically very easy to pull off with the features added to cameras like Canon’s R5 and R6, having support for this inside PL, with access to the DeepPrime-toolbox + the neural network demosaicing would make perfect sense.
Common tools like the DJI Ronin S makes it very easy to capture gigapixel panoramas. I’d much prefer to work with stitching and editing of such files within PhotoLab.
Raw support for recent GoPros would be great.
Raw support for DJI Mini 2 would make a lot of sense.
As for Youtube influencers, it seems the lot have been busy promoting Luminar AI.
Hi,
I think that PL should at least offer what nowadays are the minimum features as a photographer’s toolkit :
-
Raw converter of ALL raw files included old formats (olympus ORF, etc), exotic formats (drone, actioncam, film scanner), photophone with raw support (panasonic CM1, iphone, samsung), camera formats (FUJI X-trans, canon, nikon, etc ) and DNG files from software (LR, TOPAZ, etc)
ON1, LR and free software like Xnview ensure this with a good back compatibility. I personaly have to use On1 to process raw files that PL doesn’t support and that is a lot ! -
Metadata editing with actual XMP support but with all extra filelds, not only a title and some keywords…
When working from one software to the other we should view or edit all included metadata from IPTC to XMP. Once again no problem to manage it with On1, Xnview or LR. Adding a copyright, some notice just after a photoshoot for a quick “secure” export, I mean from a legal point, should not need to use another extra software. IPTC is a well documented standard that can be easily integrated into PL. I don’t ask to manage it all like a true DAM but there is a minimum and DXO already announced it for a long time (since PL2) and what has been offer in terms of metadata is just a shame for a big company. I hope they will wake up soon and concentrate effort in this subject instead of a DXO Pure Raw that is a lost of time IMHO. -
As the editor of the NiK software suite that I like a lot, I would appreciate a better and transparent integration with PL, saving it standalone feature for using it with other softwares. I would use it more if integrated like the presets. It’s always a pain to wait to process the TIFF files, to change the workspace, to manage the sliders and to go back again into PL. With a complicated process to keep the custom settings in case of we would need it again.
-
Color management is good even if perfectible (lack of thumbnails preview) but one feature is missing : LUT profiles should be integrated in PL. I appreciate it in ON1 and would like to share some LUT with PL1. LUT is a strong color management in video editing that offer a lot for photo editing in a standard way that can save us lot of time.
I really appreciate PL that my first one raw processing software for a precision work but after leaving LR for PL I missed the “workflow process” that I found in ON1 but I wish I could use only one software with all the files I use to manage and that lack of RAW support is my main attention that I still don’t understand if others do offer it.
So to answer the initial question, no PL should not do everything but only what photographers expect from a software to help us in their work that mean insuring to keep an eye in the RAW world with new needs from new devices and new formats, but without forgetting our archives that we are suppose to use for life and 70 years after our death.
Now It’s up to DXO to make it possible !
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Do you have any idea how many meta fields are available for editing? There’s about sixty of them, counting modestly. Adding that much metadata editing to Photolab would make it a crowded mess. Half a dozen or ten carefully chosen fields would be enough for a lightweight metadata edit module. Heavyweight metadata editing is not handled in RAW developers but in dedicated applications like Photo Mechanic which have capabilities in image management which Photolab cannot dream of (without turning a butterfly back into a caterpillar).
Raw converter of ALL raw files included old formats (olympus ORF, etc), exotic formats (drone, actioncam, film scanner), photophone with raw support (panasonic CM1, iphone, samsung), camera formats (FUJI X-trans, canon, nikon, etc ) and DNG files from software (LR, TOPAZ, etc)
Ouch. That’s again a lot of chasing. X-Trans doesn’t work well with DxO’s process or it would have been done a long time ago. Adding support which offers second rate results would be shooting themselves in the foot. For the obscure formats, there are tools out there which handle them well enough. On the other hand, handling mobile (Android and iOS) DNG is long overdue. What’s astonishing is that iOS support was there in Photolab and DxO removed it.
LUT profiles should be integrated in PL. I appreciate it in ON1 and would like to share some LUT with PL1. LUT is a strong color management in video editing that offer a lot for photo editing in a standard way that can save us lot of time.
LUT support is also long overdue, I agree.
You reckon sixty or so? That’s a bit like thinking about a grain of sand in a desert 
Here’s a list of just the XMP tags that are available, since Deneice mentions XMP support.
https://exiftool.org/TagNames/XMP.html
Then there’s all the rest.
https://exiftool.org/TagNames/index.html
Hi !
When I asked for more extra fields, I was thinking particularly in those that nowadays Google bots need to index images. Some of them are required to display the copyright’s owner. Here are the specs : Quick guide to IPTC Photo Metadata and Google Images - IPTC
Some other extra fields (the most commonly used in a archive/editing process) should be added to PLab. We don’t need all the tags just the most usual for a professional photographer that can be read through another editing/raw process software without losing any information when switching between PLab and any other XMP/IPTC readers.
Photolab is a strong piece of software for raw processing but it competes with other strong software that already offer lot of features. I still believe that nothing should be impossible if others already did it and if DXO want to stay alive in this market (raw support for all cameras included xtrans, LUT support, XMP, DNG etc). Once again i give the example of ON1, and I wish DXO as a big company, could offer one day at least the expected features that some of us claim in this forum. How many photographer give up with photolab just because of the lack of those features and despite of the good results they get with the raw processing ?
And don’t be afraid with Metatada, it’s just embedded text in image. It’s negligible regarding the extra weight needed to save it with the file or aside a file (xmp). There’s no algorithms to develop, no AI, just and indexer and a search tool that already exist for years in the computing world…
So frustrating to not be able to read/write it with Photolab !
PhotoLab est un excellent outil de traitement des images RAW. Sa spécialité et sa force résident dans ce domaine. Je suis en train d’écrire un outil léger de gestion des mots-clés et il m’a déjà fallu plus d’un an pour arriver là où je suis aujourd’hui.
Pourquoi DxO devrait-il dépenser une quantité non négligeable de temps et d’efforts, juste pour recréer ce que d’autres outils spécialisés font déjà mieux ?
Il y a un vieux dicton anglais qui parle d’être un « homme à tout faire, maître de rien ». Il vaut mieux que DxO fasse ce qu’ils maîtrisent vraiment plutôt que d’essayer de plaire à tout le monde, en faisant des choses qu’ils n’ont pas nécessairement les connaissances pour faire aussi bien que d’autres spécialistes.
PhotoLab is an excellent RAW image processing tool. Their speciality and strength is in that area. I am in the process of writing a lightweight keyword management tool and it has already taken me over a year to get to where I am today.
Why should DxO spend the, not insignificant, amount of time and effort, just to recreate what other dedicated tools do better already?
There is an old English saying about being a “Jack of all trades, master of none”. Better that DxO do what they are true masters of rather than trying to please everybody, doing things that they don’t necessarily have the knowledge to do as well as other specialists
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Why should DxO spend the, not insignificant, amount of time and effort, just to recreate what other dedicated tools do better already?
Simply because professional photographers need tools that facilitate and speed their work and it goes through a one-in-all interface usually called a Digital Asset Management (DAM).
When Lightroom arrived in the raw processing world it answered of the paradigm of the digital image process (ingest, sort, edit, index, process, catalog) . When Adobe changed their business model (standalone > subscription) lot of photographers headed towards an alternative (Capture One, Photolab, On1, Rawtherapy). All of them, except Photolab, do offer XMP support and more. No problem if DXO want to stay in an “one feature” category tool to claim the expert first place but please at least with no raw restriction format and with metadata IPTC/XMP support.
Now if the goal of DXO is to compete as a true alternative to Lightroom, sorry but there’s still a lot of work to do and the advantage of a strong know-how on image processing is not sufficient to convince photographer to migrate from LR to Photolab+PhotoMechanics (or other culling software).
Regarding the lack of support of all the Raw format it’s all the more surprising from DXO that had acquired lot of data from camera with DXOmark.
Thanx for your answer in french words
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Why should DxO not license your upcoming software? It’s about more than keywords I suppose…
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Now that would be a nice idea. Keywords and macOS Finder Tags actually. But, at the moment, it’s only written for Mac. I would still be open to offers 
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Deneice, DxO Photolab is a specialty tool which should pick its battles. Trying to take on Adobe by including every possible feature in some kind of second-rate version is a fool’s errand. The end result will be existing Photolab users abandoning DxO for CaptureOne or some other new RAW developer (there’s no shortage of good second-tier ones, nipping at Photolab’s heels, like Alien Skin’s Exposure, Topaz Studio, RAW Power, Iridient Developer). At the same time the clutter which drove away the old users attracts very few new users.
There’s so many jack-of-all-trades second-rate commercial photo tools from On1 to Luminar to ACDSee or even Lightroom itself. I and several other regulars on this forum have spent €500 or more with DxO for the best RAW development in the world (while best is arguable at low ISO, at high ISO Photolab is the clear winner). I’d love to see where this mass of enthusiastic new users with thick wallets is supposed to come from.
Losing old users and not attracting enough new users means the bell tolls for Photolab. And this is Adobe’s game – add enough features to bankrupt any competitor who tries to follow.
As a group, Lightroom users are herd following sheep and cheapskates to boot. Trying to attract them en masse to Photolab is as self-destructive as trying to attract flies. Of course, the easiest product with which to attract flies is scat.
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Hello @Deneice,
DxOMark is not a part of DxO for a few years already. It belongs to another company but still has its name that became a world known brand.
Alex
Exposure X6 is indeed a nice piece of software. Personally I cannot get used to the way its sliders impact the image but I have seen some great results nevertheless. It is certainly responsive and the dam is nice to use. Much prefer PL but Exposure has improved greatly over the last couple of releases. The company is now called Exposure Software - much preferred Alien Skins myself but there you go!