DxO PhotoLab 9 vs Lightroom

[tvalleau]

Wonderful and well thought out article. Practical and useful, and Terry did a great job. He did address one of my major gripes: extremely limited iPhone capabilities. That said, one very practical limitation still exists in DxO Photolab: you cannot go from a digital raw file to a printable grayscale image properly.

It is not possible to assign a grayscale ICC profile to an image. In fact, unlike Photoshop, you can neither assign, nor convert the colorspace of an image (or at least I cannot figure out how to do that.) In turn, that means if you print with Piezography, you need a copy of Photoshop to get from here to there.

IMHO, PhotoLab does a superior job with color, but suffers from this limitation.

[StephaneB]

Well, I have mixed feelings about the article. My general impression is that Terry did not get a deep enough knowledge of Photolab before embarking on such an ambitious series. Both flaws and qualities of Photolab get overlooked, making the article involuntarily a bit misleading.

It does several dis-services to DXO by not recognising some important qualities or stating defects that do not exist.

Examples:

• The absence of radial masks in Photolab, reinforced by the affirmation the control points cannot replace a radian filter. Well, control points can absolutely replace a radial mask if you turn off their luminance and color-based selectivity.
• The Clearview and Smart lighting features of Photolab are brushed over in a short, vague, paragraph despite being very important tools in Photolab and real assets, especially in a comparison with Lightroom. DXO Clearview put Lightroom Dehaze to shame and that is never mentioned anywhere.
• There is no correct explanation on how the selectivity of masks in Photolab works. This is a very importnat distinction in a comparison with Lightroom. The system is very good, with no equivalent in the competition. And no, it is not at all similar to an auto-brush. That phrase made me wonder if Terry had actually tried to use the product. I believe he did, but in what appears to be a pretty superficial way.

There are probably other similar cases, those are the ones I remember.

Then there are flaws that are overlooked too:

• Hierarchical keywords in Photolab are completely useless. For example, suppose you create a keywords hierarchy Europe/France Paris and assign Paris to a picture. When you search for Europe, the pictures with Paris are not included in the result.
• There is no easy way to backup the database. Moreover, the database itself is incomplete. Some data is in the database and some is in .dop sidecar files.
• There is no way on a Mac to store the database on an external drive. And Photolab can only use one database.
• Projects have severe limitations that are not properly explored in the article.
• If you delete a picture from MacOS, then Photolab cannot find it anymore. But the problem becomes permanent. There is no way to synchronise the database with the new content of a folder. The only way is to delete the database and rebuild one.
• No smart albums.
• in the geometry part, there is no mention that you cannot in Photolab flip a picture horizontally nor vertically, unless you pay for DXO Viewpoint. It is a silly mistake from DXO that can frustrate users, especially coming from Lightroom. And since this is a comparison with Lightroom, it is relevant.

Again, I do not pretend to be exhaustive here.

I have been a LuLa reader for about 25 years and I do not think those articles are at the level I have come to expect from this website.

[StephaneB]

Wonderful and well thought out article. Practical and useful, and Terry did a great job. He did address one of my major gripes: extremely limited iPhone capabilities. That said, one very practical limitation still exists in DxO Photolab: you cannot go from a digital raw file to a printable grayscale image properly.

You absolutely can. I have done it several times.

It is not possible to assign a grayscale ICC profile to an image. In fact, unlike Photoshop, you can neither assign, nor convert the colorspace of an image (or at least I cannot figure out how to do that.) In turn, that means if you print with Piezography, you need a copy of Photoshop to get from here to there.

Entirely normal. Photolab is not a Photoshop replacement. And the article compares to Lightroom, not to Photoshop. And you cannot assign a colorpsace to a picture in Lightroom either because it would make no sense. With both products you can specify a color space when you export the picture, which is the right way to do it. And that is how you can prepare a picture to print it with Piezography. Again, with both products.

[VidJa]

Impressive systems, but not as impressive as RapidRaw
https://www.getrapidraw.com/
First GitHub commit:July 2025!!!

Considering RapidRaw is being build by an 18 year old, just for fun, with very good reception by the DarkTable community, and open source AI tools and models

If this flies within the open source photographic community, it may become the Blender of the animation world. A strong alternative to the expensive Adobe, DxO, CaptureOne triangle