DxO PhotoLab 3 Wins Prestigious TIPA 2020 Award
DxO PhotoLab 3 has just won the TIPA 2020 award for the best imaging software. I make no secret of the fact that I’m a big fan of DxO software; PhotoLab, the Nik Collection, Film Pack and Viewpoints, I have them all. When I’m editing a non-Fuji image and want ultimate image quality, I use PhotoLab for the RAW conversion. And I use the Nik Collection with probably +80% of all my images.
If you want to know why I’m such a fan of PhotoLab, watch the video in my RAW Format tutorial. It shows the difference switching to PhotoLab made with some of my RAW files.
When making this award for PhotoLab 3 the TIPA jury said “The TIPA jury says: “DxO PhotoLab 3 is an amazing RAW processing software. Its wide range of adjustments adds to the already large arsenal of creative tools available in previous versions. Among the new options is an innovative HSL colour control tool for fine-tuning colour values; an improved Repair Tool for retouching and replacing image parts with powerful feathering and opacity controls; and an optimized asset management tool that supports keyword management. All the tools are easily accessible from a well-designed user interface.”
Innovative PhotoLab HSL Tool
One of the big improvements to PhotoLab when DxO launched version 3 was to the HSL tool. This featured an innovative new interface which made it easy to target colour ranges within an image. You could even refine the predefined colour ranges with a large degree of precision.
But the thing that I really like about the PhotoLab 3 HSL tool is the results. They appear so natural which is why it’s great for editing landscape photography. Often when adjusting colours with HSL tools you experience an odd colour bleed effect. It’s probably most noticeable when making a big shift to the colours. But with PhotoLab 3 you don’t seem to get this, and the results look great.
Here’s my video explaining how to use the PhotoLab 3 HSL tool for colour correction.
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Other PhotoLab 3 Tools
If you want to know more about the PhotoLab 3 tools and how to use them you might like this helpful guide explaining local adjustments. As well as, this tutorial explaining the enhancements in PhotoLab 3.2.
At the time of writing this, I understand DxO is running a 30% discount promotion until the 26th April.
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[crp]
About a month ago I bought Photolab 3 Elite plus Viewpoint 3 (because VP is not part of PL).
I am an experienced and fully satisfied Capture One 20 user. I also use the DxO Nik Collection 2.5 regulary. It was because of the many highly praising reviews and out of curiosity that I acquired the DxO software.
I am satisfied with Viewpoint 3. But not so with Photolab 3: that is to say, it may be a great piece of software, BUT it keeps rendering images (Sony A7RIII-RAWs) slowly on my pc (Windows 10 64-bit, SSD/HDD combi, Intel CORE i7, 16 GB RAM). I get annoyed at working on images constantly blurring when I move the adjustmentsliders. And I have tried really hard to get used to waiting for the images’ constantly “Full review in progress”-status. Several inquiries with DxO-support didn’t solve the problem. Meanwhile I have read the numerous comments of other users on this subject and as far as I have understood them all, it is a problem that only can be solved by DxO in future software optimalizations. Because it makes efficiently working on images (without losing ones good temper) impossible, I will stick to Capture One. I don’t expect DxO will solve the problem in a for existing users free update. And the more disapponting for me is that from today Viewpoint is part of a Nik Collection 3 upgrade.
So my advice tot future-buyers: always make use of 30-day trial periods (which I unfortunately unthinking didn’t).
That’s an unfortunate story. I’ve always found the support good and haven’t had any performance issues with one exception.
Following a recent interim version, the system was taking a long time to start up and would come to a halt when I was trying to process a RAW file. I finally traced the issue to a setting that seems to have been introduced when I made the upgrade. I’m wondering if this could be your problem so it would be worth trying.
Open the PhotoLab Preferences dialog and go to the “General” tab. Here you will find a section for “Presets” where you can set which preset to assign automatically to RAW and RGB images. These were both set to “1 – DXO Standard”. Because of this the software was trying to create thousands of sidecar files for all the images I browsed and the system would quite literally hang until this was complete (a long time). After changing both dropdown settings to “4 – No correction” and restarting the software everything was working great again.
I don’t know if this will fix your problem but it’s worth checking.
I updated PL from version 3.2 to 3.3, after which I followed your suggestion to change the preset to No correction. And that helped a lot! There is still some lag but far less than before, entirely comparable with other software I use besides C1 (AffinityPhoto and Luminar 4) and thus acceptable. So you made me happy. Thank you very much for your help!
That’s really great to hear. I’m pleased this turned out to be the problem and that it could be easily fixed.
Do u know if DxO Photolabs 3 is available as an extension for MacOS Photos? Nothing about it in App Store, but they do have OpticsPro for Photos and Perspective.
I don’t honestly know. I can see the Optics pro etc in the App Store. I also checked the extensions on my Mac just in case it comes bundled with the full install and I can’t find PhotoLab listed.
I have the DxO extension for Photos.app and it does a god “instant” job. It is extremely easy to use. You may adjust a few parameters so it is not the full-fledged DxO Photolab but then on the other hand maybe you wouldn’t use Photos.app in that workflow.
Here is the link to the DxO plugin for Photos.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dxo-opticspro-for-photos/id1056077392?mt=12