Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"While camera manufacturers keep competing for high ISO performance, DxO Labs now offers the image processing technologies which are critical to delivering top-notch image quality from such extreme ISO shots. In low-light conditions, photographers must choose between using low ISO and risking unnatural flash lighting or camera shake, or using high ISO settings with its typical image noise and loss of colors and details. But now, thanks to a new technological approach, DxO Optics Pro 6 sets a new bar for RAW conversion: photographers can push their cameras to the ISO limits and even beyond - as much as one to two stops above their usual ISO settings! - and still get great photos without any noticeable loss in image quality."

When I first started shooting raw a few years ago with my DSLR, I looked at a bunch of different raw processing software packages. With my experiments using Photoshop Elements and the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in, it quickly became obvious that processing images one by one, completely in isolation of each other, was a rather poor approach. I looked at several packages on the market, but spent the most time with Lightroom 1.0 and DxO Optics Pro 4.5. While there were several things I really liked about the DxO software, specifically the lens-based optics correction (I'm ticked Lightroom still lacks that) and the killer multi-threading, I found the user interface cumbersome to use. So have things gotten any better with version 5.0? I spent a few minutes looking at the press information, which is rife with competitive info, to find out. Read more...