Learning to use RAW files

AlwynS wrote:

Thanks Nigel, appreciate the very good response. For me, the takeaways from this are:

1. As expected, noise reduction is way, way better than C1. This is not something I normally use much so not such a big deal for me. However, I agree that this would absolutely be a critical differentiator if you expect to/need to do significant noise reduction.

2. No click edit is good. Closest C1 can come is two clicks with a style that you define and save for future use. Again on the personal needs/preference thing: I tend to treat each image individually by choice. If I do have a burst that has very similar/identical characteristics and which I want to treat similarly, I copy and apply settings from an edited image in the burst.

And then back to the personal requirements thing: I totally agree that PL is superior in certain respects, particularly noise reduction. At this time, based on my photography and what I want to do, those features, while significant, are not sufficiently important in my use case for me to pay $200 and go through the learning to make the change. Maybe if it comes up on a special at 50% off I might be tempted. But at that time I would have to do a careful review/comparison of for instance individual Topaz tools vs. DxO.

It really would be useful to see what C1 made of these two images. But I'm going to speculate that C1 produced something like this:

Typical raw developer output, similar to OOC JPEG

If so, then apart from the poor NR, the images is smaller, losing on all four sides, and the people are fattened at the edges.

Comparing the frame sizes:

The larger image DxO produces compared to the unnecessarily cropped OOC and most raw developer image

And this is how DxO fixes the fattened people at the edges:

DxO Viewpoint is built into PhotoLab, and allows the wide angle effect of fattened people at the edges to be automatically fixed