Still loving the M6II, even more with new DXO

Alastair Norcross wrote:

TiltShiftR wrote:

I must be so far gone from the game. What is Deep Prime and Deep Prime XD?

I was equally far gone a bit over a year ago. DXO Optics has a RAW processor called Photolab, with lots of neat features, including several different noise reduction and lens correction settings. They release dedicated modules for numerous combinations of camera and lens, including all the ones I use, or have ever used. A couple of years ago, they released a version of their noise reduction software called "Deep Prime", which was truly revolutionary, in that it not only reduced noise amazingly well, but it actually preserved detail better than pretty much any other RAW processor (that is largely down to the dedicated lens modules). I think that was released with version 4 of Photolab. I bought version 5 last year, which included Deep Prime, and have been using it ever since. Mostly, I only need to use Photolab, but sometimes I export a file from Photolab to Lightroom, when I want to use some Lightroom (or Photoshop) features that don't have a counterpart in Photolab. The latest version of Photolab, PL6, has a further enhanced version of Deep Prime, called Deep Prime XD (it still has the regular version too, so you can choose). In my experience, and that of numerous others who pushed me to try it last year (R2D2 especially), Deep Prime, and now Deep Prime XD, gives you at least a 2 stop high ISO advantage over what you can get with Lightroom alone, DPP, or just in-camera JPEGs. I am now comfortable shooting my M6II and R7 at ISO 25,600 and my R at ISO 51,200.

Thanks for your posts and comments. I always find your posts informative and helpful.

I also upgraded to DxO PhotoLab 6 this Black Friday. At first I did not really see a difference between Deep Prime and Deep Prime XD, but continued to use XD anyway. After processing some images of the Moon I did some comparisons and found that indeed XD did a better job reproducing deep shadow detail on the lunar images and so was a worthwhile upgrade for me. Lunar images are challenging, contrast and microcontrast are boosted to bring out maximum detail and great de-noise can make or break the image.

Like you I find the newer Deep Prime XD denoise more of a performance hit. But you get what you pay for, in money and in time. The fact that there's not a huge difference between Deep Prime and Deep Prime XD is a sign that the original Deep Prime was already so good.

Your comment that you're comfortable shooting the M6ii at 25,600 jibes with my experience. I am also interested that you find the R gets you about a stop better ISO performance, which matches my impression that full-frame would gain about another EV in ISO.