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Author Topic: DXO 5.1 Released  (Read 6721 times)

Misirlou

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DXO 5.1 Released
« on: June 03, 2008, 04:24:41 pm »

I just downloaded and installed DXO Optics 5.1 (Windows XP, on a P4 laptop). Of course, I haven't had time to fully test it.

The first thing I checked was the clipping button functionality in the histogram. There are buttons for highlight, shadow, and none. I clicked on both highlight and shadow, and they work just fine. You get colored masks in the preview window for both.

Next, I checked to see if it could pull the focus distnace out of the shots from my 40D. Still no luck there.

Overall, the whole thing seems a bit zippier than 5.0. I must say though that I never experienced the stability issues that were widely reported with 5.0. Maybe it's because I'm using XP, but 5.0 never gave me any crashes or freezes.

Anyway, if you've been waiting for thse problems to be fixed, you might want to look again. I believe there's now a 5.1 build for Mac as well.

Regards,
Wes
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sojournerphoto

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DXO 5.1 Released
« Reply #1 on: June 04, 2008, 07:53:17 am »

And now it supports the 1Ds3:)

Only the 50 1.4 prime at the moment though, but all my zooms and lots of others are covered.

Mike


Quote
I just downloaded and installed DXO Optics 5.1 (Windows XP, on a P4 laptop). Of course, I haven't had time to fully test it.

The first thing I checked was the clipping button functionality in the histogram. There are buttons for highlight, shadow, and none. I clicked on both highlight and shadow, and they work just fine. You get colored masks in the preview window for both.

Next, I checked to see if it could pull the focus distnace out of the shots from my 40D. Still no luck there.

Overall, the whole thing seems a bit zippier than 5.0. I must say though that I never experienced the stability issues that were widely reported with 5.0. Maybe it's because I'm using XP, but 5.0 never gave me any crashes or freezes.

Anyway, if you've been waiting for thse problems to be fixed, you might want to look again. I believe there's now a 5.1 build for Mac as well.

Regards,
Wes
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Huib

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DXO 5.1 Released
« Reply #2 on: June 04, 2008, 05:28:04 pm »

I hope DxO will come very soon with a version which I can install on Vista 64.
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BernardLanguillier

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DXO 5.1 Released
« Reply #3 on: June 05, 2008, 08:12:52 pm »

I have started to play with 5.1.

The main issues I had found with 5.0 beta are fixed (slow exports, unable to export tiff files,...), but there are still many minor gitches with the interface:

- slow response when opening the browser,
- when moving back from editing to browsing the browser scrolls back to the top of the directory,
- there are times when the image just disapears from the editor window after a few operations,
- ...

As far as functions go, it works well but I'll need to do more studying on some of them before being able to comment more.

The first impression is that it is totally usable and useful as a semi-niche tool, but that I would not trust it to be my main raw processing application on Mac at this point of time if real world productivity is important.

Cheers,
Bernard

BernardLanguillier

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DXO 5.1 Released
« Reply #4 on: June 08, 2008, 07:22:55 pm »

Quote
The first impression is that it is totally usable and useful as a semi-niche tool, but that I would not trust it to be my main raw processing application on Mac at this point of time if real world productivity is important.

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Slight correction...

I have found one image where the conversion engine of DxO 5.1 on Mac creates some pretty ugly and visible stair looking transitions at high contrast edges involving saturated reds (perhaps other colors as well)...

I have contacted the DxO support team on this and they are investigating the issue based on a raw Nikon D3 .nef and their own conversion vs a Capture One conversion not showing the issue.

Regards,
Bernard

Misirlou

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DXO 5.1 Released
« Reply #5 on: June 09, 2008, 01:41:24 am »

I explored DXO 5.1 some more this weekend, with a problem image I took a while back using a Canon 10-22 EF-S on my 40D. I was mostly interested in the quality of lens corrections, noise removal, and "capture" sharpening, vs. my standard Lightroom/PS CS3 + PTlens & NeatImage workflow. I made little effort to compare the color balance between the two processing paths, mostly because I've been using a custom camera profile in Lightroom that I developed with one of the popular scripts, and I don't know how to implement a similar profile with DXO. Now that I've decided DXO is really useful, I'll have to figure out how to implement a color profile.

The big surprise was that DXO was much faster. I had assumed that my far greater familiarity with Lightroom/CS3 would make that the quicker option, but it didn't. The reason is that I tend to fuss around with things like the CA correction and frame straightening tools in Lightroom, dialing them in precisely by looking at several different locations in the frame at 1:1. Also, on my Vista PC at least, it takes a long time for an edit copy of an image to open in CS3 after I select that step in Lightroom. DXO chugs a good long time in the final processing step, but the automated nature of the lens corrections more than made up for that with my test.

The quality of the final image was also better with DXO. I was using PTlens to correct the geometric lens distortions, and although it did a great job, DXO was better. The shot I used had a lot of tree branches silhouetted against a bright sky in the corners. Even though I fussed around with the CA correction very carefully in Lightroom, and then applied PTlens under CS3, the branches looked very natural in the DXO version, but had a disgreeable cyan cast in the Lightroom/CS3 one. Details also looked much cleaner in the corners of the DXO version.

Keep in mind that I tried this on one image, and spent about ten minutes using each path. I'm sure the high volume pros would never spend that much time with any processing path. Also, I was trying to correct an image from a Canon 10-22. I love that lens, but I'll be the first to admit that it doesn't approach most primes in terms of CA and distortion. Overall, I'd say the DXO version was clearly better, but that might be hard to detect when printed. At least by non-pixel peeping types.

I'll try to find another image and take more careful notes on processing times, and then upload the results here. At this point though, I can safely say DXO is back in my list of preffered tools.
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