Lightroom vs DXO

Little by little, Adobe Lightroom is becoming the reference program in the RAW processing market, overshadowing veterans such as Capture One. However, unlike Photoshop, Lightroom does not have the near-monopoly, ‘industry standard’ status and the lower entry barriers allow for a healthy competition. Even with Raw Shooter’s demise, Bibble, Silkypix or even ACDSee Pro are still going strong, with many followers.

There is however a program less talked about: DXO Optics.

Follow up:

DXO boasts some features that the competition doesn’t have, including finely-tuned optical correction. The corrections take into account the camera, the lens model, focusing distance and focal angle and DXO automatically corrects geometric distortions (which in the case of aspherical lenses can be difficult to correct otherwise), lens softness, chromatic aberrations, purple fringing and more. Going beyond simple straightening, DXO can also do perspective correction (keystoning) with more ease than Photoshop (you just click on four corners that are supposed to form a rectangle, and DXO does the rest.

DXO’s philosophy is to automate/autodetect as much as possible. Sharpness, noise reduction, exposure compensation and basically just any parameter is determined automatically by default (most often however, I still had to do many manual adjustments).

After testing it for a while, I decided to do a side-by-side comparison against Lightroom. I use Lightroom since its early beta and despite my criticisms, I love it and use it almost exclusively.

For these tests I chose some pics I’ve snapped at Notre Dame in Paris. Not the greatest I’ve done, but they were the only ones that I haven’t already converted to DNG (DXO doesn’t support DNG). Software used: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.2 and DXO Optics Pro 4.5.1. Camera: Konica-Minolta Dynax 5D with 18-70mm and 75-300mm lenses. All images have been processed as sRGB 16bit TIFF and then converted to PNG to avoid any compression artifact.

First, a stained glass shot at ISO400. The camera had no problem focusing and evaluating the exposure, so lets see the results:

DXO Optics Pro
Adobe Lightroom
	Perspective correction really helps in this image.	DXO saturates the red more, losing detail in the cloth, but provides more detail in the face.	Lightroom renders a more pleasing blue.	The Lightroom image has some artifacts in the red area.

Overall, for this image DXO gets better detail except for the red cloth in the first detail image.

Let’s see a picture shot at ISO800, 1/20s, f/5.6:

DXO Optics Pro
Adobe Lightroom
	Both version look similar, with the perspective correction being a plus for DXO.	Lightroom is able to preserve more detail in the stained glass. On the other hand, see how the corrected image shows a true circular stained glass.

Now lets see another photo taken outside; focal length was 250mm, f/8, 1/1000s, ISO200.

DXO Optics Pro
Adobe Lightroom
	The colors are a little different, mainly because I’ve played with the settings a little in Lightroom.	Although the purple fringing correction was enabled, DXO still left artifacts at the edges, whereas Lightroom produced a clean image.

This image was surprising. Despite having an exact profile of the camera lens, DXO couldn’t eliminate the purple fringing. The only way I could took it out completely was by increasing the Radius, but then the edges where the building met the sky would become messy. Granted, the Minolta 75-300 is a rather cheap, soft and slow lens, but if Lightroom can do it, so should DXO.

One last image:

DXO Optics Pro
Adobe Lightroom
	Very similar pictures, but look at the vibrant greens in the DXO version.	Notice the foliage as rendered by DXO.	Although more contrasty, DXO leaves some artifacts.

!–title Adobe Photoshop Lightroom vs DXO Optics Pro | RichNetApps Developers’ blog –>

The small thumbnails really don’t do the DXO version any justice as the detailed green foliage is a far cry from the dull brownish Lightroom rendition.

Conclusion

DXO is surprisingly good in some areas. Competitively priced against Lightroom and with its unique set of features, it can be a viable alternative, especially for architecture and landscapes. It seems to be lacking in the noise reduction area, where it removes too much detail; even with Noise Reduction turned off, it still doesn’t preserve as much fine detail. Although not shown here, I’ve done some tests on portraits and the results, while good, were below Lightroom’s quality. Finally, depending on your workflow, you may or may not miss the DAM features of Lightroom.

My advice? Download a trial and give it a chance. You might be pleasantly surprised.