DxO Tutorials

[Johnfosteruk]

I don't know if this will be of use to anyone but it went down well with another group I'm part of. It came about because I use DxO a lot, its noise reduction and sharpening are the best IMO, but although that's all some people know it for, it can do much much more. I was getting lots of questions, so put as much information as I could together into what you're about to read.

Everything here should be useful regardless of which DxO RAW editing package you use or are thinking of using, whether it be DxO Optics, or Photolab.

If you're already using it, perhaps you're not getting the most out of it. If you're thinking about using it, this may help with your decision, and if you don't know about it, you should, it has some very powerful tools.

If you are an existing user, there may be 1 or 2 adjustments that don't exist in your version, but everything else will be there. I think the impact of adjustments does vary from one version to another to varying degrees as well, but the principles are the same regardless of version. And when it comes to 'how much' adjustment to apply, it really does depend on your image, your (or your client's) taste etc.

I'm not covering PureRaw, because it doesn't really count, it's a designed to be a one-click RAW image 'cleaner'. This slots into the start of your workflow and produces a denoised and sharpened RAW file ready for PP with Photoshop, Lightroom etc, so it's not a replacement, rather an improvement to that process with those tools.

If the adjustment is too aggressive or not aggressive enough, then you tweak to suit your taste. Also, the catalog/project management has evolved a lot over the years, but I'm not covering that, or at least not yet.

This is what I do, what works for you may vary, and of course it depends on the type of images you shoot and what you want from the final image. Regardless, I do think this will help provide a starting point and give an overview of what some of DxO's key tools do differently, and better, than other packages, in my opinion. Other opinions are available.. I'm not a DxO employee or shill, I just like it, a lot.

I'll be covering several subjects, starting with an overview of DxO, then on to processing different types of image. First will of course be wildlife photographs (obviously for those that know me, that's mainly what I do!), followed by (in no particular order) portraits, landscape, architecture, general tips, mono conversion, deep dives into certain features and anything else I come with along the way. I'll break it up into separate posts within this thread.

This will take some time, and I'm very unreliable so don't expect me to keep to a schedule, but after these first few posts I'll try my best to do a new post/topic weekly.

I think some of this will be a little bit technical, but in a very accessible way. Some of the posts may be a little long, if you're looking for something in particular, try using Control or Command + F to search for a specific word rather than wading through it.

Feel free to chip in with questions, comments or tips of your own, on this companion thread. (Thanks to @Arbby for suggesting we keep this thread unpolluted).


Here we go.

 

[Johnfosteruk]

So, what is DxO?

DxO, in their own words is 'The most advanced, end to end, RAW photo editing software'.

This is a big claim, but one I agree with. I'll tell you why.

I think it's fair to say there are 3 broad categories of post processing use cases, and DxO has something for all of them:

• None at all.I point, I shoot, I do what I want with the JPG image produced.
  • My images are destined for social media, embedding on a webpage, small prints etc.
  • Or I'm so damned good and have such high end equipment or perfect shooting conditions/ability to control the parameters that my camera spits out perfect JPGs every time, no editing required.
  • I might be a 'purist', I'm often heard telling people 'you're not a proper photographer if you use Photoshop'
    
    (it's not my intent to debate this, I respect opinions, I'm just giving some context
• Light touch. I don't want to, or am unable to spend lots of time in front of a computer, I just want a nice looking image.
  • Maybe I have a problem that needs fixing (framing/cropping/straightening, noise/grain, blown highlights, under/over exposed, dark shadows, lack of vibrance/saturation etc). A lot of this stuff you can fix by doing it right in the first place, but it doesn't matter, because DxO can deal with a lot of these problems if you need it to.
• I want it all. I want the best image possible. I want the best tools and I don't care how long it takes to do what I want with the image.

DxO has something for everyone here. Even the JPG shooter can make small adjustments to improve an image if they like, but where it shines is editing RAW images. The main and most useful (for me) features (currently) are:

• The best (IMO) denoising tool available
• Optical and geometry corrections driven by DxO's own lens test data (MTF charts etc)
• Lens sharpness corrections, driven by the same test data (not just a simple unsharp mask)
• 'Body/camera profiling', ability to simulate different digital camera or film type colour rendering.
• Advanced (extremely useful and intuitive) exposure, luminosity and contrast adjustments
• Easy to use local adjustments and masks

There's much more, which I'll cover as I go through the tutorials, but the crucial point is, it does pretty much everything you might want to do to a RAW image, and it does it extremely well, with great ease, producing top class results, and quickly too.

The next post will be an overview of the software, specifically the user interface, settings & controls...

 

[Johnfosteruk]

DxO Overview

When you first run any of the DxO packages you'll see this, or something very similar depending on your version:

1. DxO call this the Photo Library. It's a file browser/tree structure for your filesystem. Use it to navigate your file system and select the folder/directory where your RAW files exist, ready for editing.
2. Filmstrip/thumbnail previewer. When you select a folder containing images in compatible formats, you'll see, and can select thumbnails on this strip, ready to sort, filter, tag, manage, manipulate and edit.
3. Command Bar. On this screen this is a view/zoom manager. These controls (L-R) allow you to:
   1. Quickly toggle between RAW and edited views of your image
   2. View RAW and edited versions side by side with a slider.
   3. View selected image full screen
   4. Zoom to fit
   5. Zoom to 100%
   6. Select custom zoom level
4. Select a preset or reset to unedited RAW
5. Open image (with current DxO edits) in Nik tools, if you have them. OR export/save edited image to disk/run in another application.
6. No, you're not imagining things, there isn't a 6, I forgot! It's the big unlabelled area centre right. This is where you see an image after selection, like so:

From here you may want to:

• Inspect images.
• Tag, rate, pick or reject images for later processing.
• Create a virtual copy, to allow different edits simultaneously (colour & mono for example)
• Select a 'preset' and export the image with no further adjustments/corrections.
• Start editing the image you've selected.

 

[Johnfosteruk]

I'll cover everything else in a separate post, for now, let's have a look at editing an image.

Once you've selected an image to edit, as in the above screenshot, there are a few ways to move into the editing screens.

1. Double click on the image in the filmstrip ('2' in the first screenshot)
2. Click on the 'Customise' tab at the top of the Photo Library ('1' in the first screenshot)

Either way, you'll see something like this (may vary depending on version):

1. Command bar. You'll find the same controls here as the Photo Library, plus geometry & local adjustments.
2. Adjustment palettes. Here you'll find most of your correction tools, organised into tabs and groups by category/type. For example light, colour, geometry, detail etc.
3. More palettes on the left hand side. These are mainly (and by default) information. Such as metadata (EXIF info/shooting parameters etc), histogram, edit history (in some versions) etc.

The palettes to the left and right of your image are where most of the work gets done, and where your decisions turn RAW files into finished images.

Here are the 'tabs' that group adjustments by category in my version, your version may vary a little but it should be easy enough to find what you're looking for.

This is over on the right side at the top of the palettes.



From left to right this is Light, Colour, Geometry, Detail, Local adjustments, Watermark & effects.

 

[Johnfosteruk]

In this view I have 'Light' selected, from here I can adjust/correct things like exposure, contrast, highlights/shadows/midtones, curves & vignetting.

Like this:



I don't need to tell you how this works, the sliders go from right (to increase) to left (to decrease), and you see the results of your correction immediately in the main image display. As previously explained you can also toggle between edited version and the unedited version for comparison.

If this is your first look at DxO, you're probably asking 'What are DxO Smart Lighting and DxO ClearView Plus?'

(You might even be wondering what they are if you're already using it, because you've not played with them yet.. Shame on you, go and have play with them now)

They're magic is what they are, big part of the DxO secret sauce. That's all I'm saying for now because I'll cover these in detail when I go through my preferred options & presets for editing different images. Just to put the detail into some context. These parts will definitely be worth reading.

 

[Johnfosteruk]

Processing Wildlife Images.

I don't know about you, but I have 2 goals when I postprocess a wildlife image. I want to fix any problems in the image (exposure, noise etc), and (if it's necessary and/or feasible), and do whatever I can to draw the viewer's eye straight to the subject. I want to make the subject 'pop'.

So let's break this down into 2 tasks, first, fixing the flaws and second, making the subject pop.. There can be quite a lot of overlap here but that's useful, as you'll see.

It helps to think of all adjustments in those terms. If the image is noisy, that's a flaw, but a RAW image that lacks detail isn't necessarily flawed because it's the nature of a RAW image to have a flat appearance. If you shoot JPG, the camera is making the processing decisions for you, starting with the 'flat' file, applying adjustments and corrections to give you a finished image. When you shoot RAW, that's your job, so you want a 'flat' file to work on.

The two problems with in camera JPGs are that cameras are not very capable in some ways. Noise reduction can be destructive to detail, or not aggressive enough. Blown highlights and murky shadows may not be recovered well.

This is why we shoot RAW, to take control and make all the decisions ourselves.

So, I've shared one of my RAW images, and I'm going to take you through my workflow, illustrating the corrections I make, with before and after screenshots of the image, and the adjustments used, explanations and so on. We'll cover the different tools that DxO has available, and how to use them to either fix flaws, or enhance your image in some way.

I'll also share a 'recipe' (I love that term, thanks to @RichM63

) for the general preset I use on wildlife images. It uses most of the adjustments I use here moderately, you simply tweak the adjustment level to suit the needs of your image. So working through this guide will take time, but once you're familiar with the workflow/adjustments, and have some presets, it won't take long at all.

EXPLORING MY WORKFLOW

Grab your beverage of choice, open DxO & load this RAW image of a Parakeet pair doing courtship stuff at their nest hole, then ask yourself what's wrong with the image.

Nikon RAW file on Google Drive




The flaws

Starting with the most obvious flaw, it's sort of overexposed. To be specific, the highlights are too bright, and there are lots of highlights with that bright spot in the background.

This can happen often, for numerous reasons. You may not shoot fully manual exposure (Auto ISO/Aperture priority etc) and the metering isn't accurate. Maybe you've intentionally overexposed with EV Comp to ensure shadow detail is captured. Or perhaps you're shooting into a very bright sky, which can throw the metering off as well.

There's also some colour noise as you can see in this crop. You can also see that the back edge of the foreground bird's head is overexposed, the detail is blown out.

The crop shows that the colour is washed out as well.

There's clearly plenty of detail in there though, look at the feathers, especially those rows of feathers around the neck, this image may be a winner.



So we have 2 main flaws, the noise and the highlights/exposure. But the flaws are causing numerous issues within the image - overall grainy appearance and lack of apparent detail, poor colour (especially important with such a vibrant subject), lack of subject separation from the background and overall washed out appearance.

 

[Johnfosteruk]

How do we fix this?

We could simply reduce the exposure, like so.

Let's take it down 2 stops.



This might work for you, it's better. The colour has improved, as you can see from the crop on the right we've uncovered some detail and we're not so washed out any more.

But the image is still 'flat' to my taste, the Parakeets don't 'pop' and the feather detail is there, but not well defined..

We've still got noise, in fact on my screen as I'm editing this it's more apparent in the full screen view than the noise in the unedited image. We'll not panic about that just yet, (and this is a very important point for my workflow). The adjustments I make could make the noise more apparent, so I'll save noise correction until near the end of the workflow when I'll know what that looks like.

So what about this exposure then? I said earlier I'd dig into 'Smart Lighting' and 'Clearview', let's do that now, and see some magic happen.

I'm going to undo my exposure adjustment/set exposure back to 0 first and turn 'Smart lighting' on using the little blue switch in the top left corner here. Leave the other settings at default for now.

 

[Johnfosteruk]

What does that do then?



What Smart lighting does is provide tonal adjustment allowing you to use the whole dynamic range within the image.

In other words it allows you to recover detail from the highlights and the shadows, much the same results as tone curve adjustments BUT unlike curves adjustments you can fully target where the adjustments happen.

You can see in the 3rd pane above that the highlights have been reduced, without affecting the rest of the tonal range. There's a touch more dimension, or structure to the birds' heads and faces.

It's not a lot though, we can do a lot more.

You'll have noticed there's a uniform and a 'spot weighted' option, set to uniform in my example above. This applies the correction dependant on the average tonal values in the image, with no limits or bounds. Let's change that to 'Spot weighted' and you'll see a new option, circled here. This is where you have some real control over your highlights and shadows.



This is similar to spot metering in your camera, in that you set the area to take a reading from.

To use spot weighting, start by clicking the tool (circled above).

Now look for the brightest part of the image, quite easy in this case, it's that patch of sky below and to the right of the birds.

Move your mouse pointer to that area, noticing that it's now a crosshair, and draw a large box inside that bright area. Make sure the box doesn't stray outside of that bright area.

You should see a similar effect to the uniform setting, but, now change the Mode to 'Medium'. You'll see some real progress with the highlights, while the shadows and midtones have barely moved at all.

 

[Johnfosteruk]

Now change the mode to 'Strong'. Even better. In this screenshot you'll notice I've made some other adjustments, but they're not active. The only active adjustment is Smart Lighting, you can turn adjustments on and off using the little switch at the top left of each palette.



With 1 simple adjustment we've turned those highlights right down, protected the rest of the histogram and the subject is already starting to pop. You might be happy to leave it there, in which case you can export to disk and do what you're going to do with the image.

I'm not going to leave it there though. I notice that by compressing the tones with the Smart Lighting adjustment, the image is in danger of looking like a bad HDR. Not a problem.

Let's enable the Clearview adjustment. This adds a little contrast, in a similar way to the Dehaze & Clarity adjustments in Photoshop and Lightroom.

 

[Johnfosteruk]

There's some good detail recovered now around the edge of that foreground bird's head, and everything else is preserved. We're getting somewhere.



I think we can start looking at detail now, and the first tool to use is the contrast palette, shown here.



You may not have all of these options, depending on your DxO version. That's fine, all versions have the first two options, Contrast and Microcontrast, so I'll focus on those for now. I'll cover the other options later.

The first option, Contrast, does exactly what it says and I'm going to push this to 15. It won't do much for the detail, it's just adding a little more contrast to the whole image, and reduce that washed out appearance a little bit more.

 

[Johnfosteruk]

Let's have a look at micro contrast, what this does is enhance or soften very small details, perfect for fur and feathers.

I've increased that to 15, look at the feathers, especially around the neck and shoulders, the detail is a little bit more pronounced. The structure of the orbital ring around the eye appears a little more defined as well.



You can push this a long way and the results can be excellent.

I've pushed it up to 50, and there's a lot more room if I like, here's the palette.

 

[Johnfosteruk]

Here's the result, lots more definition. There's depth visible in the structures now.



It does add some noise as you can see looking at the slice of background visible in the top right and the beak. We won't worry about that for now, because when we cover noise reduction we might be able to address that, and if not we can always pull the adjustment back to a more reasonable level. Also, this is at 200% crop so it's extreme pixel peeping.

I'll pull it back to 30 for now though.

There's another tool available for enhancing detail, in the 'Lens sharpness palette' on the Detail tab as shown here:



There are 3 adjustments here, you can see the main switch is off, so it's not doing anything right now.

It's more accurate to say that these settings use lens test data to correct for softness, rather than simply saying they add sharpness.

• The Global setting is the master control, it adjusts the overall strength of the effect
• The details setting enhances the finest details in the image.
• If the other two settings introduce artefacts, the Bokeh setting reduces those artefacts. Especially in out of focus backgrounds.

 

[Johnfosteruk]

Let's turn Lens Sharpness on, with all 3 set to 0. At this value, the Global setting has added sharpness, the other 2 do nothing. Look at the eye and the feathers, again, ignore the noise for now.



Let's zoom out and see how the whole image looks



Compared to the original, the exposure is improved, good colour, there's some detail. It's much improved

 

[Johnfosteruk]

This is the noise palette, on the detail tab.



It shows 3 types of noise reduction available, HQ, Prime and DeepPRIME.

If you shoot RAW, use DeepPRIME, every time. This is where the magic is. If you have one of the older versions, use the next best thing, PRIME.

You'll see there's a preview area, a luminance slider and a crosshair. The adjustment is currently switched off.

The cross hair allows you to select the area shown in preview, the slider sets the amount of reduction and the little pencil icon to the right of the slider switches between auto and manual.

I've just clicked auto, which has set the level to 40, and look at the preview here.



There's a little apparent loss of detail, but we're cropped close here, and we can compensate for that. Lets look at the Lens Sharpness palette again. I'll increase Global to 1.5 and details to 70. Now look at the preview.



I don't see a significant increase in noise, but look at the eye sharpness.

And zooming back out to the full image, it's almost there.



Not bad. There's a few more things to do though.

I mentioned body/camera profiling in the overview post. This lets you simulate the colour rendering of a different camera or film type.

I love the contrast and punchy colours of Fuji Velvia film, in fact I have a roll of it in my Pentax Spotmatic at the moment. I think this image will look awesome using that profile so here we go.

 

[Johnfosteruk]

Go to the colour tab, and select the Velvia profile as shown here, it's under the colour positive film option in the first dropdown.



This is getting there.



I wan't to increase the saturation of the blue iris, you can target specific colours in DxO. Still on the colour tab, have a look at the HSL palette as seen here:



Along the top row, select the blue circle and you'll have 3 sliders. You can saturate the blues and adjust their luminance/brightness. The Uniformity slider allows you to equalise shade variations in the select colour channel, blues in this case.

The colour wheel allows you to change the overall hue of your selected colour channel.

I'm going to push the saturation & reduce the luminance. I'm also going to reduce uniformity so we see some tonal range in the blues.

I'm also going to push the saturation and vibrancy. Saturation speaks for itself, and put simply, vibrancy saturates the less colourful parts of the image more. This will add to the overall crispness and, well, vibrancy of the image.

Two final adjustments for now:

I'm going to push the noise reduction luminance level from 40 to 60.

And I'm going to reduce highlights and blacks, push shadows slightly in the 'Selective tone' palette under the 'lights' tab. This is a go to standard adjustment which in almost every case will enhance fine detail (fur/feathers etc) to some degree.

 

[Johnfosteruk]

Here's that adjustment. As with all these adjustments, when you're editing your own images, tweak the exact values to best suit the image, but it will nearly always give you some improvement.

You could at this point also increase or decrease the exposure adjustment in the Lights palette. This image doesn't need it though.

If you do increase exposure, check for noise again, you may need to adjust the noise reduction settings to suit.

 

[Johnfosteruk]

So what have we got now? Here's a decent sized (2048 pixels on the long side) JPG export of what we have now. You could also export as a digital negative (DNG) For further work in another tool if you wanted to. This is a reasonable image as is though.



There's good detail where we want it. The primary flight feathers and some of the foreground bird's underparts are soft, but that's focus softness/motion blur etc and it's baked into the image. There's potential for noise in those areas but that's been dealt with nicely.

It's a colourful, vibrant, punchy image with good exposure, not bad for a wet windy morning in February.

Pixel peeping to full zoom reveals flaws, obviously, but you may have noticed, this image was shot at ISO 4000 on a crop sensor camera, so beggars can't be choosers.

Here's the untouched image for comparison.



I'll put all this together into a neater summary, with the recipe for my standard wildlife preset in my next post, shortly.

 

[Johnfosteruk]

This post covers 2 subjects in this order.

1. summary/TLDR of the main wildlife processing post.
2. My everyday/normal wildlife preset.

Wildlife image processing summary/TLDR

The edited highlights so to speak,

• Think about image flaws (noise, exposure, etc), and pay attention to those first. Fixing those will often overlap with your aesthetic choices.
• Smart lighting is your friend and will fix a lot of exposure related issues. Start with this when you have exposure issues.
• For noise reduction use DeepPRIME every time, start with auto and tweak as necessary. Do noise reduction late in the process, you can always go back and tweak the other adjustments if they're still destructive.
• Don't use unsharp mask to sharpen, use the 'Lens Sharpness' tool.
• For additional detail definition, use Clearview and Microcontrast.
• Zoom in close to see the small scale effect of your adjustments, it's often all about the detail with wildlife images.
• For additional colour and contrast options, make use of the profile options in the 'Colour Rendering' palette.
• Reduce highlights, push shadows, this is another way to help enhance the detail.

My wildlife image processing recipe/preset

My default preferred workflow is to select this preset, then export the processed image to disk. Job done.

After selecting the preset I may need to make further adjustments like exposure, noise, sharpness, contrast etc. Or I may decide to switch to spot weighted Smart Lighting.

All you need to do is pick an image, set these values, then right click on the image thumbnail and choose 'New Preset from Current Settings', give the preset a name and you're done.

To pick a preset on a new image, right click the image thumbnail and select 'Apply Preset'. There are some preloaded ones that can be useful from time to time as well.

Here's the recipe

DxO Smart Lighting: Uniform, intensity value 25

Selective Tone. Highlights: -20, Shadows: +10, Blacks: -7

DxO Clearview Plus: +11

Contrast: +7

Microcontrast: Auto

Fine contrast (if you have it): +17

Vibrancy +8

Color Rendering: Camera body set to my camera models (1 preset for each)

Noise: DeepPRIME: +28

Lens Sharpness: Global: +1.4, Details: +75, Bokeh: +55

Chromatic Aberration: Tick Lateral Chromatic Aberration, Intensity set to 122, size 6

I don’t include any geometry corrections because there are rarely straight lines in wildlife images and if there are any issues, I can add the adjustment manually.

 

[Johnfosteruk]

That'll do for now, more stuff will follow tomorrow probably, including how to import/export preset files.

 

[Johnfosteruk]

The next batch of content, for your pleasure and stimulation...

First, additional notes on DxO Smart Lighting

• Multiple selections for spot weighting in the Smart Lighting adjustment.

You can draw multiple squares for DxO to 'meter' from. I find this especially useful for images with a very wide dynamic range (lots of detail in the highlights and the shadows) Like this Little Ringed Plover (RAW, unedited):



The white parts of the plumage appear blown on first inspection, but there's detail there to be recovered. What we don't want to do is further darken the black band around the bird's chest. There's a lot of detail there as well and that would be lost if we did that.

As I covered in previous posts, Smart Lighting lets me select the brightest part of the image for smart lighting to compress, in this case recover that white feather detail. But in this image I want to reduce the overall exposure a little bit as well, because smart lighting doesn't get me all the way there.

Doing that would darken those black areas even more, which I don't want... So what we do is draw a box in the apparently blown white area on the neck, and draw a box in that black area around the chest like so:



You can see the two boxes above, the larger of the two has recovered detail in those highlights as you can see. The smaller box sort of locks, or protects the shadows/blacks so when I reduce the overall exposure they don't end up getting more clipped than they already are.

And because those shadows/blacks are kind of protected from the exposure adjustment you have a good starting point for pushing them up via the Shadows and Blacks sliders in the 'Selective Tone' palette, like so:





Multiple boxes are also useful if the first box you draw to recover highlights leaves you with some remaining areas that have the highlights clipped.

You just zoom in and draw another box in those remaining clipped areas. Magic.

That actually happened with this image, here's the result after numerous boxes, some exposure and selective tone adjustments. The highlights aren't blown and we still have detail in the dark areas.