Why I'm sticking with DxO for RAW processing

Jacques Cornell said:

Folks, I want you all to know that I posted this not to start an argument or do a he-man pose as "The PRO", but to share my experience so that those of you who face similar requirements and are wrestling with Lightroom on tight deadlines can at least be aware that there is an alternative. I'm happy to field questions and help any of you problem-solve.

But I won't take insults kindly.

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This is good, this is what DP Review is good for. I think your experience is bound to show up in people's search results and for what it's worth, this has been my experience with PhotoLab as well. You can open the folder with your photos and everything is already tuned to your default preset.

It's as good as it gets for me. Sometimes experts who have not used it tell me ACR and LR will somehow be better for me. It seems sometimes as though Adobe has employees in here.

Zeee said:

We also don't need constant reminders of how superior other software is. Interesting on how on the day of release LrC yet another how much more superior DXO is post. Even started a new one. What prompted that? We know. The OP has posted the same thing over and over here and the Mac forums.

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Why should that bother you?

Zeee said:

This is this directed at you. It's funny how some claim to have pressure and time constraints (which I believe) have time to spend all day on forums.

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Why direct this at me? I never said I have pressure and time constraints. I defy you to show where I did. The fact is I am retired and have all the time in the world and spend 2 hours a day on this forum. After 7-8 hours of sleep it leaves me 14-15 hours a day for other activities..

--
Tom

Corialtus said:

Zeee said:

tbcass said:

I don't blame you for being upset. DPR is full of people who think they know what's best for other people they don't even know. For what it's worth it takes me only a few minutes to process 500 +/- 42mp RAW photos with DXO Photo Lab 8.5. I shoot Cross Country, Track and field and I easily shoot 400-600 photos per event.

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We also don't need constant reminders of how superior other software is. Interesting on how on the day of release LrC yet another how much more superior DXO is post. Even started a new one. What prompted that? We know. The OP has posted the same thing over and over here and the Mac forums.

This is this directed at you. It's funny how some claim to have pressure and time constaints (which I believe) have time to spend all day on forums.

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I agree with you.

If someone prefers a different piece of SW it doesn't actually matter. However, some people behave as if it's a personal insult and pursue an evangelical crusade to prove to themselves , and others, that they, and only they, are right

If there were a "best" editing package then we'd all be using it. Self evidently we're not!

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I don't believe Jacques Cornell was doing that. He just gave his experience with both software for informational purposes.

One other benefit of PL that just occurred to me -

When exporting, PhotoLab doesn't lock up and preclude any further action while it processes noise reduction the way LRC does when processing Denoise. It does become less responsive, but I can still do other things while it works in the background. Had I continued applying Denoise to my 12,000 image batch, I'd have had no use of LRC for four days, and I couldn't pause the process without losing all progress and having to start over, or at least so it seemed. I hope I'm wrong on that last point, but it was hard to tell and I'm not motivated to test this. Maybe someone else can test and report back. With PL, I can keep on working, even queueing up additional exports.

--
Event professional for 20+ years, travel & landscape enthusiast for 30+, stills-only.
http://jacquescornell.photography
http://happening.photos

Huh... I suppose I take that pretty much for granted. On 9800x3d I can be processing a hundred photos with deepprime whatever and still edit others at full speed.

JC_123 said:

Jacques Cornell said:

Folks, I want you all to know that I posted this not to start an argument or do a he-man pose as "The PRO", but to share my experience so that those of you who face similar requirements and are wrestling with Lightroom on tight deadlines can at least be aware that there is an alternative. I'm happy to field questions and help any of you problem-solve.

But I won't take insults kindly.

Click to expand...

This is good, this is what DP Review is good for. I think your experience is bound to show up in people's search results and for what it's worth, this has been my experience with PhotoLab as well. You can open the folder with your photos and everything is already tuned to your default preset.
It's as good as it gets for me. Sometimes experts who have not used it tell me ACR and LR will somehow be better for me. It seems sometimes as though Adobe has employees in here.

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Seems like there are DXO employees in here as well. Seems like every fall around upgrade time there is a little extra Adobe bashing going. This is not the first year I posted this observation. You should have seen it in here in 2018. I'm sure glad I didn't listen to the doom and gloom predictions I was going to face if I signed up.

I don't care what anyone uses and I'll never tell you or anyone what best for you/them. Especially if you have never used it. Whatever works best for you.

First hit for an example. Minute 8:45. I've seen faster.


I've seen faster.

Jacques Cornell said:

It gets worse. I'm working through my archive replacing RAW files with much smaller lossy DNGs. I queued up 12,000 images in LRC and applied Adaptive Color. This took more than a day, during which time I couldn't do anything else in LRC. Then, I started Denoise, let it run for a while, and calculated it would take four days to finish. Are you kidding me? I cancelled the process and gave up. Applying my PhotoLab preset would take maybe a few minutes, during which time I could continue to work, and processing DeepPRIME 3 on export would take 16 hours.

This is not even close. LRC is simply not fit for high-volume work. Adobe's got some neat tech for diddling a single image, but PhotoLab remains the event shooter's friend.

And, those big 61MP RAW files won't be clogging up my drives after I convert them to 24MP lossy DNGs anyway.

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I have been thinking about doing something similar using lossy DNGs. I know that Adobe can make them and use them in LrC and Ps, but can most other editing programs handle lossy DNGs?

Jacques Cornell said:

Adaptive Color took an hour to sync across 400 images. Then, Denoise took three hours to process.

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As a test, I just did those exact steps to a shoot with 301 24MP photos. Adaptive Color took 14 minutes and Denoise took 40 minutes. I agree that is a pretty long time to wait, but nowhere near the times you posted. I have a laptop that I consider to be the low end of the performance range with an i7-12700H processor and an RTX 3060 laptop GPU. No idea why yours is so much slower in LrC, but understand your pain.

In reality, I culled the folder down to 51 photos and would only have processed those few, resulting in only a handful of minutes of AI processing.

I admit I haven't trialed DXO for quite a few years, so I have no idea of its current status. If it makes you happy and productive, that works for me. LrC/PS is good enough for me.

gscotten said:

Jacques Cornell said:

Adaptive Color took an hour to sync across 400 images. Then, Denoise took three hours to process.

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As a test, I just did those exact steps to a shoot with 301 24MP photos. Adaptive Color took 14 minutes

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Yeah, last night, I got a similar result. Weird.

gscotten said:

and Denoise took 40 minutes.

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I got two hours this time with 323 images. DeepPRIME would have been 5 seconds each, or 26 minutes.

gscotten said:

I agree that is a pretty long time to wait, but nowhere near the times you posted. I have a laptop that I consider to be the low end of the performance range with an i7-12700H processor and an RTX 3060 laptop GPU. No idea why yours is so much slower in LrC, but understand your pain.

In reality, I culled the folder down to 51 photos and would only have processed those few, resulting in only a handful of minutes of AI processing.

I admit I haven't trialed DXO for quite a few years, so I have no idea of its current status. If it makes you happy and productive, that works for me. LrC/PS is good enough for me.

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I've been bench testing DeepPRIME and Denoise performance on my Macs for a couple of years as my hardware and software has changed, and DeepPRIME XD/XD2s has consistently run 2x faster, and DeepPRIME/DeepPRIME 3 has consistently run 5x faster, than Denoise on an M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max Macs with 10, 24 and 32 GPU cores, running Sonoma, Sequoia and Tahoe.

bakubo said:

Jacques Cornell said:

It gets worse. I'm working through my archive replacing RAW files with much smaller lossy DNGs. I queued up 12,000 images in LRC and applied Adaptive Color. This took more than a day, during which time I couldn't do anything else in LRC. Then, I started Denoise, let it run for a while, and calculated it would take four days to finish. Are you kidding me? I cancelled the process and gave up. Applying my PhotoLab preset would take maybe a few minutes, during which time I could continue to work, and processing DeepPRIME 3 on export would take 16 hours.

This is not even close. LRC is simply not fit for high-volume work. Adobe's got some neat tech for diddling a single image, but PhotoLab remains the event shooter's friend.

And, those big 61MP RAW files won't be clogging up my drives after I convert them to 24MP lossy DNGs anyway.

Click to expand...

I have been thinking about doing something similar using lossy DNGs. I know that Adobe can make them and use them in LrC and Ps, but can most other editing programs handle lossy DNGs?

Click to expand...

PhotoLab effectively cannot handle lossy DNGs - they appear blown out and magenta. Pixelmator Pro, Photomator, Aperty and Preview can all open and display them correctly.

Here's a workflow oddity: In LRC, if you want lossy DNGs to replace lossless DNGs (e.g. after exporting lossless DNGs from PhotoLab), you can do that via the Convert to DNG drop-down menu item. But, you cannot resize them. If you want to resize them, you have to Export and then delete the lossless DNGs afterward.

Uh, Adobe? Over here. Yeah, the photographer in the corner you've forgotten about - dumped, really - in your enthusiasm for courting the hot, young "creator" chicks. Um, why not enable "replace" and "resize" in both places?

I've been petitioning DxO to enable exporting of lossy DNGs directly from PhotoLab to save this step. Now that I think of it, maybe I should check out Adobe's DNG Convertor...

--
Event professional for 20+ years, travel & landscape enthusiast for 30+, stills-only.
http://jacquescornell.photography
http://happening.photos