The comparison was with Lighrtoom 3.

Thanks for stopping by.

In your comparison you MUST add, which Lightroom version, you refer to? I believe from the dates, that it must be LR2. Right? In that case, it would be absolutely lovely if you did your comparison again based on LR3, because of the major changes in the program!

DxO DNG output files are extremely large. A DxO supporter explains:
“They are much bigger even LZW compressed. When I make them the 8-bit TIFFs are 2-3 time the size of the NEFs and 16-bit TIFFs at least 4-5 times bigger. But the are as they should be. The DNGs are big because you can’t put the lens correction data in the format Adobe uses (which they keep changing for their own business purposes and so are in no way a “standard” IMHO. Linear RAW is a well established “standard” and that’s what DxO makes — but they are demosiced RGBG data just like 16-bit TIFFs with only the Lens corrections made to them. No other way to do this and keep to “Standard” being followed.”

I also made my own test of this software: http://cor-oskam.blogspot.com/2011/01/test-van-dxo-optics-pro-65.html

I think DxO's real power comes from the camera / lens module combination. I've been having trouble really incorporating DxO into my workflow as well. I use Lightroom as my main catalog and adding DxO into the front of my workflow (convert using DxO and then pull into Lightroom) works OK but definitely adds a lot of additional up-front time to my processing.

I'm still loving the outputs of DxO though.

Thanks for writing this up. It's been a few years since I've looked at DxO. Last night, based on your blog, I gave DxO another shot. It did do a lot better than I had hoped. However, it only seems to do better when it has a lens and body module installed.

It may still do a decent job with unknown (Zeiss, Leica, Hartblei) lenses but I still haven't found a decent way to incorporate DxO into my workflow. It has an export to Lightroom button that will export a DNG which may be an option. However, since I'm now using custom color profiles generated using the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport, I do not want to miss that step and it only creates DNG color profiles, not ICC ones which is what DxO uses. If I can find a way to get that incorporated, it may be an excellent option for improving image quality from the RAW NEF files.

- Wil
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