The example above is a picture of the Lloyds Building in London. Set to Medium it has brought out detail in the ceiling vaulting and darker recesses while picking up and accentuating the atmospheric lighting.
You will see how Smart Lighting had brought out detail in the curtain, in her T-shirt and in her hair, without causing highlights to burn out or spoiling the tonal qualities of the face.Įxample 2, above, is an internal shot in Salisbury cathedral, shot at high ISO using available light. The only illumination was a Metz CT45 hammerhead flash held high and left, supplemented by a small slave unit on the floor below with a guide number of 15. Example 1, above, is a picture I took for a client in a dark room against a black curtain.
I loved this feature and it is something that I use all the time in my picture processing, both in my personal work and my professional work. I think the two most impressive features, although there are many others, are the Smart Lighting and the Noise Reduction. But if a picture has problems, then you will need to tweak them manually, and that’s when it gets fun. The adjustments it sets are a good starting point and rarely caused me immediately to wish to change or cancel them. As Standard its main setting are: Exposure compensation to Auto DxO Smart Lighting to Slight Protect Saturated Colours On Noise Reduction On Auto Vignetting on Auto, Chromatic Aberration on Auto and DxO Lens Softness On. DxO Optics Pro 9 automatically defaults to a Standard set of options when you load the pictures. The far right palette, the Customize palette, is where all of the image processing adjustments are located. Once downloaded, the red arrow is replaced by a green dot. Most commonly used cameras and lenses are there in the DxO database.
The red arrow indicates you haven’t, but by simply clicking on it, it takes you through the steps necessary to find and download the module you need. You can set it so that it will automatically download any modules it needs in the future. This shows whether or not you have downloaded and saved a module for the particular camera and lens combination that took the picture. The Organize palette on the left-hand side allows you to navigate through your computer’s drives to find the folder you need and, once highlighted, the contents – whether JPEGs or RAW files – will be displayed along the bottom of the window.Ī blue asterisk indicates that images are yet to be processed and underneath that you will see, to begin with, a red arrow. When you fire up DxO Optics Pro 9 the user interface is well presented, easy to navigate and I found it very intuitive to use. The company has also enhanced its export tools and workflow options. It also has DxO Smart Lighting which intelligently adapts to image contents and can be further enhanced by using it in conjunction with modules that can be downloaded from the DxO website optimised for the camera and lens used.Īlso added on Pro 9 are new presets such as Portrait, Landscape, Black & White and Single-Shot HDR.
New features on the Pro 9 version include PRIME noise reduction circuitry, which is claimed to give you one full stop when shooting compared with anything else on the market.
Now, having lived with and played with Pro 9 for a while, it is easy to see why. Impressive it was, too, and it was certainly wowing the crowds.
If you were at The Photography Show recently at the NEC in Birmingham, you would have seen the guys from DxO Optics doing a slideshow presentation of the latest Pro 9 version of their photo processing software.