Aperture and DxO?

[rgg195]

Any one using this combo? After reading that this is a good combination for some people, I bought Dx0 and am looking for some workflow suggestions and best practices.

I primarily want to take advantage of Dx0 lens correction abilities and pass the file along to Aperture for storage and further post processing. I am thinking of passing over a lens corrected TIFF file from Dx0 as well as the original raw file to Aperture. Any thoughts?

[Bob Rockefeller]

Any one using this combo? After reading that this is a good combination for some people, I bought Dx0 and am looking for some workflow suggestions and best practices.

I primarily want to take advantage of Dx0 lens correction abilities and pass the file along to Aperture for storage and further post processing. I am thinking of passing over a lens corrected TIFF file from Dx0 as well as the original raw file to Aperture. Any thoughts?

I don't use DxO, but I do use the Perfect Photo Suite and would imagine that they work in about the same way as far as workflow from Aperture goes. Perfect Photo Suite connects to Aperture via plug-ins. But I would think you could round-trip to DxO from Aperture by setting it up as Aperture's external editor.

Catapult is a third party plug-in that is supposed to work between Aperture and DxO, too, but I've only heard of it. never tried it. http://brushedpixel.com

For me, I'd start by importing the raw file into Aperture and doing as much work on it there (non-destructively) as possible. Then round-trip to DxO for the finishing touches as a TIFF. That would leave you with the raw file with Aperture's adjustments and a TIFF file with Aperture's adjustments baked in with DxO's adjustments on top. - both in an Aperture stack.

Bob

[rgg195]

Thanks. I like that idea, it keeps most of the corrections in Aperture for future use.

The other idea I am considering is to do the initial raw conversion in DxO for my D800e files, apply the custom Dx0 lens/camera combo corrections for distortion, noise and sharpening, crop, and save as 16 bit TIFF. I would then import both the baked TIFF and original RAW file into Aperture and go from there.

Pros and cons to both ideas.

BTW, I am really enjoying Aperture, it is so much quicker to move around in compared to Lightroom. I also use the Photo Stream abilities a lot. I shoot a lot a lot of photos with my iPhone and its nice to have instant access and storage of these files, and have a current portfolio always available on my iPad with almost no effort or work required.

Cheers,

[gerafotografija]

Sorry for the late reply, just saw this post. I use Aperture for Raw import and managing files, but tend to use PS for anything beyond crop/straighten, WB and exposure adjustment.

I tried both the dxo filmpack and alien skin exposure in both Aperture and CS6, and came to the conclusion that having the plugins working on layers in PS was better in my workflow.

You can see a few examples of the types of output I got during testing a few of the various film simulation packages including dxo in this series of posts on my blog.

I didn't really see any noticeable difference between the few images I processed in the Aperture versions (for the ones that work with Aperture) and the PS plugin versions, but that wasn't my focus. So, I continue to mostly open the partial edited images in PS after importing in Aperture.

Btw, I decided not to get dxo after the trial period expired. I really like the way you can use the tools in Exposure better than dxo. Plus some of the default film simulations look better to my eyes.

I'm curious how you're using dxo these days? Are you working only in Aperture?

[Matero]

Hi,
I've just implemented DxO for my workflow together with Aperture. Basic reason is lens and camera body corrections. I'm not doing a lot PP, only occasionally tweaking WB, sharpness, exposure etc.

I converted all my Aperture libraries to referenced ones. (I know I lost some adjustments, but in my case I could justify that.) Now I can use whatever RAW developer I like, I compared Lightroom and DxO and the latter one suited me better. I can even use all these three, if there would be need for that.

After doing whatever in DxO, I export high quality JPEGs (95% quality to save some disk space) and catalog and share the images, for what Aperture is really great (and you can easily combine video with you images).

For my eye, far from perfect, maybe even good, the end result is now satisfying. And the noise reduction done for high ISO images in DxO is impressive.