# DPP vs LR vs ? for Raw conversion



## sanjosedave (Dec 25, 2015)

Does one or the other provide superior raw conversion - DPP, LR, ?


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## neuroanatomist (Dec 25, 2015)

I prefer DxO for the lens corrections and Prime noise reduction. 

I use Apple Apeeture for my image library management – DxO is terrible for that.


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## AlanF (Dec 25, 2015)

I similarly use DxO in the main for raw conversion and PRIME for noise reduction and tweak the exported JPEGs in PS 6 for cropping and sharpening. However, I do use DPP for my little G3 X as it handles it well.


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## takesome1 (Dec 25, 2015)

That is a very good question, and possibly one that is a moving target.

Over the years I have made the comparison several times. Not long ago I would have told you I thought LR was superior. The last two years I have been using LR because of it was better at noise reduction. After buying the 7D II and 5Ds R in the last year I noticed that LR required quit a bit of NR just to match the in camera JPG's. I need to do the comparison again, however LR seems to have many more tools available.

Like Neuro mentioned with DxO, I do not use LR or DPP to sort. I use Adobe Bridge and store by date or subject with files. One of the faults in the past with bridge is that ratings and meta data applied in Bridge were not read in LR, that has been corrected with new versions. Now if you make changes in Bridge you can Sync it manually with LR.


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## candc (Dec 26, 2015)

I had been using dpp quick view to rate and cull, but now have switched to fast raw viewer for that. I normally use dxo to convert. It does a really good job straight away without any tweaking. It has the best automatic lens correction and noise reduction but you can't make local adjustments, it has no masking tools so you need to use a separate image editor for that. Lightroom is the best all in one solution for importing, cataloging, and editing.


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## Neutral (Dec 26, 2015)

sanjosedave said:


> Does one or the other provide superior raw conversion - DPP, LR, ?



Both C1 and DXO Pro provide better and faster results in many situations.
I am using LR, C1 and DXO Pro.
LR as the main DAM and for renaming images on import and for initial previews and edits.
In most cases LR provides very good results.
But I also frequntly swith to Capture One or DXO Pro to see if I can get better results.
DXO Pro for better lens corrections and Prime Noise reduction and to Capture One for better IQ at lower ISO range. C1 provides excellent image quality and amazingly fast (better use of GPU CUDA technology).
So all of them (LR, DXO and C1) complements each other very well.
Each one has it's own strength at certain areas.
Some time back DXO was significanly slower than LR but now with good CUDA support it is significanly faster than LR but not so fast as C1.


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## Neutral (Dec 26, 2015)

Neutral said:


> sanjosedave said:
> 
> 
> > Does one or the other provide superior raw conversion - DPP, LR, ?
> ...


Also C1 is superior to LR and DXO for color edits and latest version also allows to create selection masks based on selected color ranges.
And it also allows to use multi-layer corrections - much similar to what is normally done in PS corrections/masks layers.. 
And C1 provides both catalogs and sessions modes support.
So if Adobe will not be supporting stand alone LR versions in future releases I will most probably will abandon LR and will be using only C1 and DXO Pro, C1 as main DAM.


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## Zv (Dec 26, 2015)

Sorry, I'm a bit behind on the latest software out there can someone explain DxO and what your workflow would be? 

Do you import RAW files into DxO and then do your lens corrections and then export the file as TIFF to use in a secondary program like LR? Is the lens correction in DxO really that much better to warrant this extra step? Can you do batch corrections? 

And Prime, is that a separate program for NR? Or is it part of the DxO package? (I hardly ever bother with NR these days. The 6D files are clean enough and I usually just leave noise in.)

I have only ever used LR / Photoshop. I tried DPP but it wasn't that impressive. What am I missing out on?


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## candc (Dec 26, 2015)

dxo doesn't have an import feature. 
i normally use windows to import photos from the memory card. 

open the folder with dpp or fast raw viewer to rate and delete 

open the folder with dxo to convert: it has downloadable "lens modules" that automatically detect the camera/lens combo and apply corrections. prime is built in and you can choose it or standard noise correction. prime takes longer to process but gives really good results. 

normally i don't need to do any additional editing so i just convert but you can pass the image to ps or lightroom in whatever format you want. there is an option to "export to lightroom" which creates a dng and passes it off to lightroom if you want to do some local edits 

another way to do it is to use lightroom for importing and sorting etc. dxo installs a plugin to lightroom so you can select an image within lightroom and choose "plugin extras" "transfer to dxo" it will then open the raw file in dxo where it makes the conversion and transfers a dng back to lr.


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## Neutral (Dec 26, 2015)

Zv said:


> Sorry, I'm a bit behind on the latest software out there can someone explain DxO and what your workflow would be?
> 
> Do you import RAW files into DxO and then do your lens corrections and then export the file as TIFF to use in a secondary program like LR? Is the lens correction in DxO really that much better to warrant this extra step? Can you do batch corrections?
> 
> ...



1. First of all DXO is only pure RAW convertor and useless as DAM (for maintaning images archive).
So it is better to use LR as DAM and use DXO as external editor in LR.
DXO provides tight integration with LR so DXO could be started as plugin from LR or on the other hand you can use DXO as standalone version and you can export corrected images from DXO to LR catalog.

2. PRIME is very heavy CPU NR option in DXO and user can select normal fast NR which is good and on par with LR or select PRIME to get amazingly good NR preserving color and small details for very high ISO images ( e.g. above ISO 6400).
On my laptop it takes about 80sec for 1DX file and about 150 sec for Sony a7r2 file.

3. Lens correction is also very good, especially usefull is lens softness correction option for supported lenses. It is better to see that one time rather than to read descriptions of that
This is for what DXO is doing sensors and lenses measurements - to build lenses correction modules for different sensors on different cameras. And then they share measurements results on DXOMark site.

4. There is batch processing option where user can start processing batch of images in DXO.


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## Neutral (Dec 26, 2015)

Neutral said:


> Neutral said:
> 
> 
> > sanjosedave said:
> ...


Good overview of the Capture One new and revised features for the latest C1 release:
http://captureoneblog.com/capture-one-9-review/


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## Zv (Dec 26, 2015)

candc said:


> dxo doesn't have an import feature.
> i normally use windows to import photos from the memory card.
> 
> open the folder with dpp or fast raw viewer to rate and delete
> ...



OK got it thanks. I'm familiar with LR plugins. I could try it that way.


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## Zv (Dec 26, 2015)

Neutral said:


> Zv said:
> 
> 
> > Sorry, I'm a bit behind on the latest software out there can someone explain DxO and what your workflow would be?
> ...



Thanks for the info on Prime. I rarely go over ISO 6400 so I guess I'll stick with LR's noise reduction. But still it's good to know for future reference.


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## neuroanatomist (Dec 26, 2015)

Zv said:


> Thanks for the info on Prime. I rarely go over ISO 6400 so I guess I'll stick with LR's noise reduction. But still it's good to know for future reference.



Personally I use Prime NR at ISO 3200 and above on FF (which for me is a fair amount of my shooting). On APS-C, I use Prime over ISO 800.


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## dppaskewitz (Dec 26, 2015)

Neutral said:


> Also C1 is superior to LR and DXO for color edits and latest version also allows to create selection masks based on selected color ranges.
> And it also allows to use multi-layer corrections - much similar to what is normally done in PS corrections/masks layers..



Can you also create selections/masks in Capture One (latest version) based on luminosity values?


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## JMZawodny (Dec 26, 2015)

Zv said:


> Sorry, I'm a bit behind on the latest software out there can someone explain DxO and what your workflow would be?
> 
> Do you import RAW files into DxO and then do your lens corrections and then export the file as TIFF to use in a secondary program like LR? Is the lens correction in DxO really that much better to warrant this extra step? Can you do batch corrections?
> 
> ...



I use a simple folder tree structure to manage my photos as that suits my needs (I only shoot ~30,000 photos per year). When you start DxO you can select a folder and it will place thumbnails of all the image files from that folder at the bottom of the DxO workspace. Depending upon your settings, it will apply all of the lens corrections automatically. If you have not used a body/lens pair in DxO before, it will detect that and ask to import the correction info, before applying it. You can grade and delete photos from within DxO, but that is the extent of the management functions (other than exporting images to a separate folder of your choice). DxO also has some rudimentary image filtering/subsetting ability. I usually look at each image once and assign one star to the ones I need to look at again or delete the ones that are obvious rejects. I can then set the filtering to hide the zero-star photos and revisit those remaining to apply white-balance, adjust the rotation, ... adding a star each time through to reduce the number of photos that I want/need to spend more time on. Eventually, I get to the point where I do a final crop, select Prime noise reduction if required, and then do a batch export of the final images. All along the way, the processing is non-destructive and everything you have done to the image is kept in a .dop file for each image. Exporting images will use your computer's GPU via OpenGL to speed things up. A large number of files may take a very long time to export if Prime NR is selected. With Prime, it takes about 34 seconds per 5D2 image (DxO can process 4 images concurrently) on my Retina 5K iMac.

I do not use various tricks to grade the images in my camera as I take them, so I do not know if there is a way to do that in a DxO compatible way. I tried using the DxO plug-ins in LR, but I do not like to manage my files that way. So, I do not use LR, or PhotoShop for that matter, anymore. There is a free 30-day trial available - try it out.

Edit: The DxO file created for each image has the .dop suffix.


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## Zv (Dec 26, 2015)

JMZawodny said:


> Zv said:
> 
> 
> > Sorry, I'm a bit behind on the latest software out there can someone explain DxO and what your workflow would be?
> ...



Wow! I don't think I've even taken 30,000 pictures in my entire life! I probably shoot less than 5000 a year and it seems to be getting less and less. My current LR catalog has just over 8k images in total. I'll look into the free trial and see how it goes. I doubt I'll use it though. Been quite happy with LR. Was just wondering if there was some secret process I needed to be aware of that everyone knew except me! I feel like I've been out of the game recently. Need to study more!

Thanks for sharing!


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## JMZawodny (Dec 26, 2015)

With the events I like to shoot, I get well over 1000 in a couple of hours - especially with the 7D2 cranking them out at 10 per second. For those events, my keeper rate is pretty low as only 1 or 2 out of a burst of 15-20 have the right content and composition. I throw away 85-90% of my shots.


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## Zv (Dec 27, 2015)

Just downloaded and tried DXO trial version. I kind of like it, might end up buying it. The controls seem easy enough. Do you guys just use the DXO Standard preset or do you create your own preset for each camera and lens combo? The auto NR seems to go overboard though - it set it to 40 for an ISO 320 shot. Certainly cleaned it up! 

I'll play about with it some more before making up my mind. Thanks for the tips.


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## Neutral (Dec 27, 2015)

Zv said:


> Just downloaded and tried DXO trial version. I kind of like it, might end up buying it. The controls seem easy enough. Do you guys just use the DXO Standard preset or do you create your own preset for each camera and lens combo? The auto NR seems to go overboard though - it set it to 40 for an ISO 320 shot. Certainly cleaned it up!
> 
> I'll play about with it some more before making up my mind. Thanks for the tips.



In most cases DXO Standard preset is sufficient to get good image without need to do anything else after (e.g. for lanscapes, city shots and other kind of general photography).
If you do portraits it would be better to use DXO neutral preset modified with reduced lens softness correction. This would give more neutral and more realistic skin tones. DXO standard preset oversaturates and distorts to some extent skin tones sometimes making face to look as burger.
If I want to try DXO for portrait shot I use my own custom preset based on DXO neutral preset with reduced lens softness and for color rendering set to Kodak Portra 160C film simulation from DXO film pack instead of default camera color rendering.
DXO film pack is useful tool if you want to simulate look of many films from pre-digital era.

But generally for portraits I get better and faster results using LR with local face corrections - mostly clarity and saturation for better face skin rendering. Very quick and easy, just couple of mouse clicks. 
For best result it is better to use C1 which handles that in much better and precise way than LR via Color editor and adjustments layers and better initial rendering.

Portrait Professional is also interesting tool to get almost instant results for portraits and have desired look. It is such fun to play with it , I always enjoy using it.
You can simulate and adjust artificial light source and make any portrait to look as it was done in studio.
Latest version has addional options for applying make up and this is really very fancy.
Very nice toy to enjoy your time )))


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## Valvebounce (Dec 27, 2015)

Hi Zv. 
Just like any software tool, it can give good or even great results out of the default settings, it also has a multitude of presets aimed at different subject matter which can help if the default is not to your liking. 
After saying all that, like is a very personal and subjective thing and the presets were created by someone else so why not tweak them to better suit your personal taste, or if you are like me and desperately trying to learn to PP, grab a slider and drag it around and see what it does, (bear in mind if the eye is crossed through you do not see the changes and need to zoom in to 80%) it is all non destructive and there is a handy reset button at the top for when you have made a complete mess!

Cheers, Graham.


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## jebrady03 (Dec 27, 2015)

To me, it doesn't have to be DPP vs LR. I use both, depending on my needs. If I'm looking for straight out of camera jpgs (I always shoot RAW), DPP is a great option. Just remember, it uses whatever settings you have in the camera automatically. So if you, for instance, shoot with sharpening at 0 to pixel peep on the back of the camera and ensure you have a sharp shot, if you don't change that in DPP, your jpg will have 0 sharpening. That applies to every other setting as well. Whatever is in the picture, will be in your jpg UNLESS you change it.

Also, depending on your use, the DLO module in DPP can be GREAT.

My biggest gripe with DPP? No local adjustments and no vignetting option (can't add vignette). Those are the main reasons I use LR.

As for NR... I rarely use it and if I do, I don't use much. Noise isn't objectionable to me. I shot an ISO 12800 image just last night that I intended to convert to B&W. In LR I did luminance NR of 10 and color NR of 15. That's it. And that was after raising local exposure on my son's face over a stop in some places to neutralize some of the shadows. To me, a perfectly clean image is towards the very bottom of the list in terms of desirable attributes and it blows my mind that some people obsess over it.


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## JMZawodny (Dec 27, 2015)

Zv said:


> Just downloaded and tried DXO trial version. I kind of like it, might end up buying it. The controls seem easy enough. Do you guys just use the DXO Standard preset or do you create your own preset for each camera and lens combo? The auto NR seems to go overboard though - it set it to 40 for an ISO 320 shot. Certainly cleaned it up!
> 
> I'll play about with it some more before making up my mind. Thanks for the tips.



I generally start with one of the standard presets. If the white balance needs tweaking, I'll adjust that on one photo, create my own preset, and then apply that to the rest (as appropriate). Since saving a preset from a photo you've been working on, saves ALL of the settings (including horizon rotations and crop boxes), you need to be careful and methodical.


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