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Transcription

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User Manual
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DXO OPTICS PRO V3.5 USER MANUAL
Table of Contents
OVERVIEW ....................................................................................................................3
GETTING STARTED – OPERATING MODES .......................................................................5
‘FULLY AUTOMATIC’ MODE ...........................................................................................8
WORKSPACE ANATOMY ......................................................................................................................................9
TOOLBAR ..........................................................................................................................................................11
MENUS ..............................................................................................................................................................12
PREFERENCES ....................................................................................................................................................21
PROCESSING .....................................................................................................................................................25
DXO VIEWER WINDOW ANATOMY ....................................................................................................................28
‘KEY CONTROLS’ ........................................................................................................33
W O R K SPA C E A N A TO M Y .................................................................................................................................34
T O O LBA R S.......................................................................................................................................................36
M EN U S .............................................................................................................................................................41
PR EFER EN C ES .................................................................................................................................................48
K EY C O N TR O LS PA LETTE ..............................................................................................................................52
PR O C ESSIN G ....................................................................................................................................................79
D X O V IEW ER W IN D O W A N A TO M Y ................................................................................................................81
‘EXPERT CONTROLS’ ...................................................................................................85
W O R K SPA C E A N A TO M Y .................................................................................................................................86
T O O LBA R S.......................................................................................................................................................88
M EN U S .............................................................................................................................................................95
PR EFER EN C ES ...............................................................................................................................................103
E X PER T C O N TR O LS PA LETTE ......................................................................................................................107
PR O C ESSIN G ..................................................................................................................................................145
D X O V IEW ER W IN D O W A N A TO M Y ..............................................................................................................148
CREDITS AND PERMISSIONS....................................................................................... 153
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OVERVIEW
Thank you for purchasing DxO Optics Pro v3.5.
Our software is unique on the market in offering this range of facilities, with this quality
of results, and with the very important feature of being fully automatic (though with
manual overrides if desired) and fully batchable.
Just like the earlier versions, v3.5 offers image enhancement through precise, intelligent
correction of several of the major defects affecting images from modern digital
camera/lens combinations. Without any input from the user, it can make radical improvements to the optical defects of geometric distortion and lateral chromatic aberration,
vignetting, and lens softness, as well as white balance and exposure, and image
processing defects associated with demosaicing and raw conversion.
With a minimum of user input, to mitigate shortcomings in the EXIF data from some
camera/body combinations, the corrections in these circumstances can be made with as
great a precision as usual.
What’s new in v3.5 (for v2 users)
-
DxO Noise: 2-stop noise reduction algorithm for Raw or RGB (Jpeg and Tiff) images
DxO Lighting: intelligent exposure control and dynamic range optimization (‘global’
and ‘local’ contrast).
-
Choice of three operating modes: Fully Automatic, Key Controls, Expert Controls.
Enhanced DxO Raw Engine for greater control of the Raw conversion process.
Additional USM sharpening options—new features: dual control, ‘radius’ and ‘level’.
Control of image Tone curve and HSL (Raw and RGB (Jpeg and Tiff)).
Still able to operate fully automatically and give superb results, but now also gives
access to (previously-restricted) internal adjustments for manual user over-rides.
-
Possibility of storing, applying and managing user ‘presets’ (‘side-car’ files with all
settings for a given image that can then be applied easily to other images).
-
Output format option—possibility of saving in multiple formats
What’s new (for v3 users)
-
Unrestricted access to DxO Lens Modules
DxO Optics Engine improvements:
Noise and Sharpening—new algorithms help preserve more fine detail
Chromatic aberration and color fringing—major changes to improve
performance and extend correction
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-
Multiprocessing—offers the possibility of up to 100% increase in processing speed
when using a multi-processor computer
-
User interface improvements to make image selection and viewing easier, faster and
more efficient:
Add images—a whole new window to facilitate image selection
Twin-pane workspace window—simultaneous display of both thumbnail and
preview images
-
Disk cache for faster previewing
Improved workflow efficiency with new user-defined Crop feature
Max frame—retain up to 40% more image area during distortion correction
Because of all the added features, and the redesign of all the interfaces, it’s very
important that you read this manual thoroughly, in order to get the most out of all the
new functionalities—in addition to that easy-to-achieve quality of results that you’re
already used to!
This User Manual assumes you have already installed the software as per the installation
instructions supplied with it.
Please refer to the reference section at the end of this manual for comprehensive details
of system requirements and of all the various functions—this part of the manual
describes the various functions and explains how to use them, and will encourage you to
explore and try out all DxO Optics Pro’s powerful features.
System calibration
To get the most out of DxO and ensure that the adjustments you make will be properly
displayed, it’s very important that the monitor on which you are viewing your images is
properly adjusted. Ideally, you should make sure it is calibrated according to the
manufacturer’s instructions, and carry this calibration right through to your normal
output device (printer, etc.). If you are not able, or don’t want, to go through a complete
calibration process, you should at least make sure that your viewing angle is correct and
that your monitor’s contrast and brightness are set correctly.
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GETTING STARTED – OPERATING MODES
The very first time you run DxO Optics Pro, a wizard pops up to tell you about the three
operating modes, to explain the differences between them, and to invite you to choose by
means of radio buttons which mode you want to begin with. Don’t forget, though, that
you can change modes at any moment later, even while you’re working.
Just like previous versions, v3.5 offers all the speed and convenience of “one-click
correction” — which produces optimum results in the vast majority of cases, and in all
cases, will result in improved images compared to the uncorrected versions. In ‘Fully
Automatic’ mode, certain menu items are inactive, and all settings are automatic or pre-
defined, so there is nothing for the user to do but select the images to process, and press
‘Start’. The ‘default’ preset will be applied to all images selected for processing (this
‘default preset’ can be edited in the ‘Expert Controls’ workspace, see later chapter).
However, for more advanced users who require the ultimate control over every single
aspect of the correction, all settings are available via the correction tools palette
(available in the ‘Expert Controls’ workspace), and a simplified selection of them in the
‘Key Controls’ workspace, and you can choose which functions to adjust manually and
which to leave automatic.
What kind of user are you?
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To make it easier to use DxO Optics Pro in the way that best suits your needs, the User
Interface or workspace can be displayed in 3 different layouts: Fully Automatic, Key
Controls, and Expert Controls (you can change between them at will).
All users are recommended to read carefully the first part of this guide, Getting started –
‘Fully Automatic’ workspace anatomy, where we describe the basic operation of the
software in its simplest, most automatic and ‘hands-off’ form, ideal for first-time users.
This contains basic information that will help when you move onto the more sophisticated
workspaces.
‘Fully Automatic’ Mode
This unique mode can really be thought of as a PC-based camera and lens upgrade: every
image (Jpeg/Tiff or Raw) is processed automatically with all available DxO image
enhancement technologies without the need for any user intervention. Do note that the
complete range of DxO corrections is only available for those bodies and lenses for which
you have purchased the corresponding software correction module. This is ideal for the
photographer who wants to take advantage of DxO Labs’ unique capabilities for outstanding results, yet spend the least possible time in front of their computer. It is also
ideal if you’re a relative newcomer to digital photography, aware of some of the defects
affecting your pictures, but not yet familiar with digital image processing. This is also the
quickest way of processing a whole series of images for assessment purposes—
remember, your original image file is not touched, so at any time you can revisit an image
and apply manually-adjusted corrections.
‘Key Controls’ Mode
This mode presents the essential controls that determine image rendition. It is especially
useful for quickly fine-tuning the interpretation of an image, or for users who want
control of their photos without being overwhelmed with choices. All other processing
remains fully automatic. What’s more, ‘Key Controls’ mode allows you to apply presets
that you’ve already defined in the ‘Expert Controls’ workspace, so if you’ve taken several
series of photos under certain specific conditions (location, lighting, etc.), you can quickly
and easily use DxO Optics Pro’s powerful preset features to apply one or more
customized preset corrections to all your groups of images in one pass.
‘Expert Controls’ Mode
The preferred operating mode for users who want to combine DxO Labs’ unique image
enhancement technologies with their own interpretation and treatment. In particular, for
Raw file development, the ‘Expert Controls’ mode offers a comprehensive set of adjustment options, presets, output choices, etc. All this flexibility and creative opportunity is
covered in detail in the chapter on the ‘Expert Controls’ workspace, including of course
the powerful feature of creating and managing various custom presets.
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It’s important to emphasize that DxO will not over-write your original image files, but
saves your enhanced images as new files, in the same location as the original files (or any
other location you can specify), with a suffix appended to the filename. Both the default
suffix and the default location can be changed using settings in the ‘Expert Controls’
workspace, in the ‘Output file format’ tab of the ‘Workflow’ palette (see later ‘Expert
Controls’ section). Do note that an error will be produced if your original files are located
on a non-recordable medium (for example, a read-only CD-ROM) and DxO tries to save
the corrected images to the same location. In this case, all you have to do is change the
default directory for saving corrected files (see ‘Expert Controls’ section).
Throughout this Manual, a * preceding a command indicates that it is available as a
toolbar button.
RAW AND JPEG IMAGE FORMATS
‘Raw’ refers to the type of unprocessed image files originated by most digital still
cameras intended for serious photographers—it is not a single format, but rather a group
of formats, since each manufacturer has their own way of handling these image files. On
their own, they cannot be viewed, but have to be converted into one of the common
graphics file formats such as JPEG or TIFF. DxO Optics Pro supports an ever-increasing
number of manufacturers’ raw formats, and in general, processing raw image files can be
expected to give better results than processing already-converted JPEG (or TIFF, etc.)
files, since more data is available for subsequent processing. For large batch working,
processing time for the larger files can also be a consideration, but this is largely
addressed by the workflow flexibility and powerful batching facilities that DxO Optics Pro
provides.
If you prefer to use your own third-party raw conversion software, there’s no problem—
you can use DxO Optics Pro to correct your image originating from a camera raw format,
thus allowing you to take advantage of DxO’s optical corrections, for example, and then
choose DNG as the output file format; in this way, you can then use your preferred raw
converter to convert this DNG to JPEG etc. as required.
DxO Optics Pro offers the same level of image correction features for both Raw and JPEG.
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‘FULLY AUTOMATIC’ MODE
In this chapter, we’re first going to take a look at the basic anatomy of the ‘Fully
Automatic’ workspace, then quickly go through the menu commands, toolbar
buttons and corresponding keyboard shortcuts, before finally taking a look at the
DxO Viewer that allows you to see the final results of your corrections.
The basic sequence for processing images is always the same: add the images you
want to process onto your workspace (or drag-&-drop from other applications), and
then in Fully Automatic mode all you have to do is click ‘start batch’ to begin
processing. Once completed, you can use DxO Viewer to see the results.
Some of the new features in version 3.5 do not apply to Fully Automatic mode, and
so you will notice that certain toolbar or menu commands (accessed from the other
modes) are always grayed out in Fully Automatic.
Now let’s take a look at all this in a bit more detail…
The underlying DxO Optics Pro workspace is the same for all 3 modes, except that
in Fully Automatic mode there is no need for a preview image, so only the thumbnail
display is available, and hence there is no twin-pane mode:
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Workspace anatomy
A toolbar…
Mac Version
…a workspace for handling images—
the electronic equivalent of a light-box…
…and a status bar at the bottom of the screen,
used for displaying various details
of the current image and processing.
WARNING
This document describes the Windows version of DxO Optics Pro v3.5. The Mac
version features the same functionalities and workflow, except for the menus that are
slightly different. Please refer to the dedicated chapter in the Reference section at the
end of this document.
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Windows Version
a toolbar…
Pull-down menus across the
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Toolbar
The buttons along the toolbar all relate to the most frequently-needed commands
from the pull-down menus, and each button provides a tooltip explaining what it
does when you roll the mouse over it. Menu commands that have a corresponding
toolbar button are preceded by an * in the description below.
Let’s go through these buttons one by one and summarize their functions.
Add Images — opens the ‘Add images’ browser window, where you can
easily navigate around your files and folders. We’ll come back to this a bit
later.
Remove images — simply removes any selected image(s) from your current
workspace
Move to trash — actually deletes any selected image(s) from your disk (sends
them to the recycle bin)
Do Process — marks selected original image(s) for processing (even if they
may have been processed previously, for example)
Don’t Process — marks selected image(s) not to be processed (they will
simply be skipped during batch processing)
Remove ‘Don’t process’ — cleans out all images marked as ‘Don’t process’
from your workspace. In fact, it also cleans out any other images that cannot
be processed—for example, corrected images that have already been
processed by DxO.
Rotate left & right — rotates any selected image(s) clockwise or counter-
clockwise (portrait / landscape formats)
Screen layout (this facility is not available in Fully Automatic mode, so the
button is grayed-out)
Filters — opens a sub-menu with check boxes allowing you to enable display
of “Don’t process”, “Ready to process” and “Already processed” images. Very
useful to avoid a cluttered workspace after initial viewing!
Sort — opens a sub-menu offering options to either leave thumbnail images
unsorted (i.e. in the order as loaded), or to sort them by file date or name, or
group them by camera body or lens type.
Viewer — opens the DxO Viewer (see separate description) for before/after
viewing of corrected images. Note that an error message will be displayed if
you attempt to open the Viewer before you have any corrected images for
viewing!
Start batch — once you have selected the images to be included in your
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batch, and made any settings and adjustments you want, this is the ‘Go’
button that will start the DxO processing of your batch. A processing
progress window opens (see separate description later) to keep you
informed of progress, but it is otherwise a ‘hands-off’ process from this
moment on.
Menus
Here’s what you’ll find under the six pull-down menus, with the associated toolbar
buttons:
The first two menus are common to all three workspaces.
The File menu includes commands to
*Add / * Remove images—the first step in any work session will always be to add
the images you wish to preview for processing onto the workspace; the Add
command [Ctrl + O] opens a browser window where you can select single or
multiple images, and transfer them onto your workspace, where they appear as
thumbnails. Remove image(s) [Ctrl + Del] is self-explanatory, and there is also
* Remove “don’t process” images [Ctrl + Backspace] that allows you to automatically
remove all images that you have selected not to process, in order to make your
workspace less cluttered. Select all images [Ctrl + A] does just what you’d expect.
The Delete files command sends unwanted files to the recycle bin.
Exit is also available from this menu [Alt + F4]
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TIP
Note that images loaded from a write-only CD-ROM drive will not be able to be saved
after processing back to that same drive, so you will need either to copy them first
into a working directory on your hard drive or CD-R/W drive, or change the
destination path for output files to a recordable location using the ‘Output file format’
tab [under the ‘Output settings’ palette in ‘Key Controls’ mode (Ctrl + F4) or ‘Expert
Controls’ mode (Ctrl + F9)]—see below. If you choose not to copy your files across
before processing, note that the side-car settings file will not be able to be saved
alongside the original image file.
When you select the ‘Add images’ command (or use the keyboard shortcut or
toolbar button), a whole new ‘Add images’ window opens to let you find and select
the image file(s) you want to add. If you hover the mouse over a filename, a tooltip
will be displayed giving certain key image properties. If you select multiple images
to be added, a progress bar will appear at the bottom left of the status bar, along
with a ‘Stop’ button to allow you to cancel loading of the images.
This is one of the version 3.5 tools that is a real time saver, and makes workflow
management that much easier. The ‘Add images’ browser window is divided into
two resizable panes—the classic left-hand pane showing the tree structure of your
disk, and the right-hand pane showing the selected folder as either thumbnails of
your images, or as the usual list of file details.
Note that the Mac version is quite different, please refer to ‘Add images’ in the
Expert controls chapter for a full description.
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On this ‘Add images’ toolbar (and the same commands are available from the ‘File’
and ‘View’ menus), you will find:
Add selected image(s) to main workspace
Delete selected image(s) — in fact, sends them to the recycle bin
Select all images
Sort — as in the main workspace, there’s a drop-down for sorting by
filename, size, date or type
Filters — again, as in the main workspace, a drop-down gives you the option
to filter out images that have already been processed, RGB images and Raw
images.
These last two make it easy to pre-select images for adding to the main
workspace.
Display thumbnails / Display details—two mutually-canceling buttons to
select the right-hand pane display mode.
Return to main window—instead of closing / minimizing the ‘Add images’
window using the usual controls, you can use this button to toggle between
the main workspace and ‘Add images’ window; handy if you want to come
back and add further images later on, as it saves time by avoiding having to
regenerate the thumbnails each time…
A status bar at the bottom right of the window confirms the filter criteria in use.
In ‘Fully Automatic’ mode, images you add will be displayed initially as a series of
thumbnails on your ‘workspace’, and once you have added one or more images, you
can select / deselect them with a single left-click [toggles]—selected images are
shown with a heavier frame round them (as we’ll be seeing later, the color of this
frame can be set under the Misc. tab of the ‘Preferences’ menu). As usual, Ctrl + left
click lets you select multiple images at the same time, while Shift + left click lets
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you select a range of adjacent images. You can drag-&-drop them to change the
order around.
For technical reasons, no corrections are applied to the thumbnail images.
The image thumbnails will be displayed with various icons to indicate their status:
Ready to be processed
-
Already-processed image, but with at least one different setting
Previously unprocessed image with no ambiguities
Already-processed image where corrected file is missing
The image cannot be processed because it has already been processed using
DxO Optics Pro—or because the image is a Raw file format that is not supported
Either the image file is corrupted, or the format is unreadable; the image will not
be processed
In these last two cases, you will probably want to either remove these images from
your workspace, or select them and choose “Don’t process” from the Workflow menu
(see below), in which case the image will display the “Don’t process” icon in its top
left-hand corner.
“Don’t process” selected for this image
Raw image, camera profile information is available, but not the lens correction
module required: only raw conversion, noise reduction, DxO Lighting, USM
sharpness and ICC color space are available, no optical corrections will be applied
JPEG image, lens correction module is missing, but noise profile is available: only
noise reduction, WB, Tone Curve, HSL, USM sharpness and DxO Lighting corrections
are available
JPEG image, lens correction module is missing, and noise profile is not available:
WB, Tone Curve, USM sharpness and DxO Lighting are the only corrections available.
Missing focus: you need to enter focusing distance in order to perform optical
corrections; otherwise, one or more of the lens/camera-dependent optical corrections will not be performed
‘Are you Sure’ — image has been modified using third-party software, but it can
be processed by DxO, with no performance guarantee. (Please refer to the ‘Tip’ at
the end of this section)
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Below each thumbnail image is displayed its filename, together with the type of
image (JPEG or Raw).
Except in the case of corrupted, unreadable or “cannot be processed” files, the
image will also be marked with a checkmark, indicating that the image is ready to be
processed, or is an already processed image where at least one setting has been
altered.
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IMPORTANT TIP
It’s very important to understand that in ‘Fully Automatic’ mode, the settings applied
when processing your images are those of the ‘User default’ preset; as delivered, this
is set to be the same as the factory default preset (which cannot be altered), but you
can modify these settings and save them as your own, personalized ‘User default’ in
‘Expert Controls’ mode. From then on, ‘Fully Automatic’ mode will use these settings
for processing your images. Needless to say, you can always go back to ‘Expert
Controls’ mode at any time to modify them as you see fit!
Here is a summary of the factory defaults at delivery:
Focusing distance: if missing, focus is set to infinity
(in Fully Auto only; always asked in other modes)
White balance: as shot
Exposure: as shot, highlight recovery off
Orientation: “don’t know” forces a 90° clockwise rotation
Focal length: if ambiguous, set to EXIF data
Color space: sRGB
DxO Lightness: auto, at ‘medium’ strength setting, with Preserve Shadows ON
DxO Lens Softness: auto
Distortion: 100%
Chromatic Aberration: ON, auto settings, except Purple Fringing setto O FF
Vignetting: 100 %, Shadow/highlights preservation set to auto
USM: OFF
HSL: OFF
Tone Curve: OFF
DxO Noise: auto
Output settings:
No image zoom
JPEG quality factor: 90
Destination directory (for both corrected image files and their ‘sidecar’
settings files): same as original
At the end of processing, after viewing processed images in the DxO Viewer
(described later), next time you return to your workspace, the thumbnail icons will
be updated to reflect the images’ new status.
The status bar at the bottom of the screen gives information about a selected image,
or about any image if you hover the mouse over it. On the left is displayed the full
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path name for the image file, in the center are details of the camera and lens used
to shoot the picture (where this information is available), or a note to the effect that
it is an already-processed image.
The Workflow menu too is basically the same as for the other two workspaces,
except that only the first three commands are available (the others are grayed out):
* Start batch [Ctrl + S] processing
* Mark image as “process” [F12] / “don’t process” [F11] — enable you to skip processing of selected images.
In common with the other two workspaces, the Workspace menu offers Mode select:
the 3 workspace layout options:
Fully Automatic / Key Controls / Expert Controls
You can select these at any time, and the layout of your workspace changes to suit.
The Wizard offers an introductory text that helps you pick the right mode for your
need by recapping on the uses of the three workspace modes, with a radio button
for each. This wizard is displayed automatically once only, the very first time you
run the program.
The ‘Preferences’ command and shortcut [Ctrl + P] access adjustments to certain
overall working parameters: version 3.5 has some additions here, please see
dedicated paragraph later
The Image menu offers the possibility to rotate your image * left (counter-clockwise)
[Ctrl + L] or * right (clockwise) [Ctrl + R] in order to be able to view portrait images
with the correct orientation.
In the ‘Fully Automatic’ workspace, version 3.5’s new View menu now offers direct
access to the DxO Viewer (see later dedicated chapter for details)—also available via
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the
toolbar button and the Ctrl + W shortcut, for before/after viewing of
corrected images. Note that until processing has been completed, DxO Viewer will
only be able to display already-processed images whose files still exist in the
chosen output file location. An error message will be displayed if you attempt to
open the Viewer before you have any corrected images for viewing!
Layout — this command is inactive in ‘Fully Automatic’ mode, since only the thumbnail view is possible in this mode.
Filters — opens a sub-menu with check boxes allowing you to enable/disable
display of “Don’t process”, “Ready to process” and “Already processed” images. Very
unsorted (i.e. in the order as loaded), or to sort them by file date or name, or group
them by camera body or lens type.
The View menu also includes * Previous / * Next image commands, once again
available as keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl + Æ for next and Ctrl + Å for previous.
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The Help menu offers access to the complete help file (i.e. this User Manual) [F1],
plus details of the various module options installed [Ctrl + M], and an About…
information screen containing information about the exact software version,
important if you need to contact DxO Technical Support. There’s also a command
you can click, and the software will check automatically for updates.
TIP
DxO Optics Pro is designed to correct images straight out of your camera. This means
that images that have been previously corrected with other software will not be
accepted by Optics Pro for correction.
Please check the on-line FAQ at http://support.dxo.com/ for the most recent updates
related to this requirement. DxO Optics Pro has been designed to be at the very
beginning of the workflow, at the point images are copied from the card reader or
camera.
Any of the following circumstances will prevent images being accepted for DxO Optics
Pro processing:
– The image has been treated in other software programs;
– The image has been modified and the MakerNote (manufacturer-specific part of the
EXIF metadata) is missing;
– The image does not carry any EXIF data.
A new feature in version 3.5 is the ability to process images that have been previously
processed by certain authorized third-party applications (so far, the list includes
Picture Project® and Nikon Capture®) that leave the EXIF MakerNote intact. Such images
can be processed by DxO Optics Pro, but the results performance cannot be
guaranteed. For this reason, these images are marked with an
‘Are you sure?’ icon.
DxO Optics Pro itself strives to leave as much as possible of the metadata (EXIF,
MakerNote, IPTC, XMP) untouched. This means that you should be able to use your
other image processing/editing software even after the images have been processed by
DxO Optics Pro.
DxO Optics Pro automatically rotates the images if you use the autorotate facility of
your camera. There is no need for additional software for this particular step.
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Preferences
The ‘Workspace’ menu ‘Preferences’ command and shortcut [Ctrl + P] access
adjustments to certain overall working parameters, by means of four tabs:
Misc. tab
Under this miscellaneous tab, combo-boxes let you select the sizes of both
thumbnail and preview images, select the working language, go on line to check for
availability of new DxO Correction Modules or software updates (with a check-box
offering the option to do this automatically at each start-up), choose whether you
prefer to use metric or imperial units for measurements, and disable the jingle that
plays over the splash screen when the program starts.
Changes made to language or preview size only come into effect the next time you
start the program, so if you want them to take effect immediately, you will need to
exit and re-start the program.
WORKSPACE TIP
Depending on how many images you want to view in a given batch, you can adjust the
size of the displayed thumbnails to fit as many as possible on the workspace, while
keeping them as large as possible. Note that in twin-pane mode (i.e. split screen
displaying both thumbnails and preview), the preview size will shrink automatically to
fit, so the preview size selected here will only represent the maximum size possible.
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Appearance tab
This tab allows you to choose your own colors for the workspace backgrounds,
image outlines and various other display elements. Click on any item to display its
current color, and then if you want to change it, click on the current color button;
you will be presented with a typical Windows color palette to choose from, or the
option to create a set of customized colors of your own.
Viewer tab
Under the ‘Viewer’ tab, radio buttons let you choose to use the DxO Viewer (the
default setting), or an external viewing utility. A combo box allows you to select the
order in which you want DxO Viewer to present your images when it first opens,
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with the options of Input/Output (before/after) and Output/Input (after/before), as
well as Output (after) alone. This only sets the initial presentation—once in Viewer,
local commands enable you to toggle at will between the two versions of your
images, unless of course you have selected ‘Output’ alone.
Note that if a viewer other than the DxO Viewer is used, images will be previewed
immediately after they are computed, whereas if DxO Viewer is used, preview of all
images will be available only at the end of processing the whole batch. In practice,
this is likely to save time when processing large batches of images.
Multiprocessing tab
The multiprocessing tab offers some speed-up options for those with suitablyequipped computers.
The multiprocessing combo box lets you select how many processing tasks you
want to run simultaneously during batch processing and cache generation. The first
figure shows how many processes to enable, while the second figure indicates how
many (logical) processors your system has available. If your system has more than
one logical processor, it makes sense to enable as many processes as there are
processors available. But it is important to note that image processing uses up a lot
of memory, especially with larger images (over 8 M pixels). The amount of RAM used
will be around 10× the image size for JPEGs, and as much as 20× for raw images.
Another speed-up feature is the disk cache, which allows DxO Viewer to precompute “before” raw images; this speeds up refresh time when using the Viewer to
display before / after images. You can set here how much disk space to allocate to
the cache, and the directory you’d like the system to use for it. The Browse button
opens a browser window where you can choose an existing directory or create a new
one.
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Processing
That completes our tour of the Key Controls palette, so now you are ready to adjust
the settings for your images, and then push the Start button (or use the Ctrl + S
keyboard shortcut, or select the ‘Start batch’ command from the Workflow menu).
Version 3.5 includes a multi-processing feature that can help speed up batch
processing, if your computer is equipped with multiple (logical) processors. The
configuration options for this new feature can be found under ‘Preferences’ (Workspace menu, or Ctrl + P). Here are a few general details about processing:
–
At the start of processing, DxO first performs a number of checks on the batch
images; at the end of these checks, it may be necessary for the user to respond
to one or more questions before processing proper can commence; for example,
if there are images for which the focusing distance has not been set, a dialog
box pops up, asking whether you want to continue without correcting distortion
and chromatic aberration, or cancel the batch to go back and set the focusing
distance for these images.
– To improve processing efficiency in the event of multiprocessing, images are
always sorted before processing, so they will not necessarily be processed in
thumbnail order
–
Depending on the number and size of your images, and the different corrections
being applied, processing may take from just a few seconds to several minutes,
or even longer in the case of slower computers.
–
If the disk cache has been enabled, raw images will be calculated immediately
batch processing finishes, so that converted ‘Before’ images will already be
available when Viewer is launched. Without the disk cache, ‘Before’ images
cannot be calculated in advance, which slows down Viewer launch where large
images are involved. This saves a lot of time at the review stage.
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–
During processing, a batch dialogue window opens to keep you informed about
progress. It has a progress bar showing progress of the batch as a whole. The
lower part of the window shows details of the image currently being processed,
and its individual progress.
–
The ‘Skip’ button allows you to skip a particular image, while the ‘Pause’ button
lets you pause one or more processes (if multi-processing is enabled)—this
allows you to temporarily free up CPU time if you need to run another application,
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for example. In this case, the images awaiting processing are simply shared out
between the other processes still running.
–
Where multi-processing is being used, the lower part of the screen shows
progress information for each process running; up to 4 will be displayed at
once—if more are being used, a vertical scroll bar will allow you to view the
others.
–
Once processing is finished, a log screen (common to all the workspaces) is
displayed which will report any problems that might have been encountered, and
offers ‘View’ and ‘Done’ buttons.
–
When Raw images have been processed and saved only in DNG format, they
cannot be displayed in DxO Viewer, and so in this case the ‘View’ button will be
grayed out.
–
‘Done’ terminates the current batch and returns you directly to the main DxO
workspace, while ‘View’ opens the DxO Viewer, which makes it very easy to go
through all your images and compare the corrected versions with the originals.
Let’s take a look at that now…
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DxO Viewer window anatomy
Mac Version
A toolbar…
used for displaying various image and zoom
information
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Windows Version
Pull-down menus across the top…
a toolbar…
used for displaying various image and zoom information
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Just like the main DxO Optics Pro screen, the Viewer’s Image menu offers
commands for * Rotate 90° counterclockwise (left) / clockwise (right) [Ctrl + L or R],
along with a new command, * Delete results file(s), which enables you to delete the
corrected file for the current image—for example, if after viewing you decide that
you’d like to process an image again, or in cases where you have more than one
output file format and want to eliminate one or more of them.
The Viewer’s View menu offers commands for * Next / Previous image [also
available as keyboard shortcuts Æ or Ç and Å or È], as well as switching between
* Before / After DxO images [Ctrl + D / Ctrl + F], and also for * Zoom in / out [Ctrl
+ + or -], * Fit to window [Ctrl + I], and * Actual size [Ctrl + 1] .
All these same Image and View menu functions are also available via the Toolbar
buttons:
Zoom + / – functions, as well as two other view scaling options:
Fit to window, and
Actual size. Note that any zoom setting you use will be
applied to both original and corrected images.
Rotate 90° counterclockwise/ clockwise buttons enable you to change the
orientation of your images.
Screen layout — just as in the main workspace, opens a sub-menu where you
can choose to view thumbnails or preview images alone on your workspace,
or as 2 panes allowing you to view both at the same time—the last 4 menu
options enable you to choose where the thumbnail pane is positioned with
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respect to the preview pane. Note that the thumbnails in the Viewer window
bear the same icons as those in the Workspace window, so you can easily see
at a glance if the relevant DxO Lens Module was used or not.
Previous / Next buttons allow you to navigate through your images.
A pair of
After DxO / Before buttons enable you to toggle back and forth be-
tween the original (unprocessed) and corrected versions of your images — also
available simply by right-clicking anywhere in the workspace to toggle between the
two [Keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl + D / Ctrl + F].
The Delete results file(s) button
allows you to delete selected results files—you
might need to do this, for example, for certain images that you wish to correct again,
or in cases where you have more than one output file format and want to eliminate
one or more of them.
The
button will close the Viewer window and return you to your DxO Optics Pro
workspace.
The bottom status bar displays the filename currently being viewed in the center,
and if you hover the mouse over it, a tooltip displays information about the corrections that have been applied.
A legend in the bottom left-hand corner confirms whether you’re viewing the
original or corrected image, and indicates if only partial correction has been applied.
In some cases, it may not have been possible to apply all the corrections requested
to an image, and those that have been applied will be indicated here.
In the bottom right-hand corner, image magnification is indicated as a percentage.
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Note that if you have resized images as part of your processing, such images will
show a difference in size between the original / corrected images in the Viewer.
Normally, before / after images will appear with their centers aligned, and so will
overlay correctly (unless you have resized them). However, in the specific case where
an image corrected using the ‘Max frame’ feature yields a corrected image that
extends outside the original image boundaries (even after any cropping), the
before / after images will be displayed with their centers re-aligned, which may
mean that the overlay is displaced.
After viewing a newly-processed batch of images, when you return to your main
DxO Optics Pro workspace, the thumbnails for that batch will be updated.
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‘KEY CONTROLS’
In this chapter, we’re first going to take a look at the basic anatomy of the ‘Key Controls’
workspace, then quickly go through the menu commands, toolbar buttons and
corresponding keyboard shortcuts, before taking a look at the various control ‘palettes’,
and finally, at the DxO Viewer that allows you to see the final results of your corrections.
The basic sequence for processing images is always the same: add the images you want
to process onto your workspace (or drag-&-drop from other applications), double-click
on an image to access ‘preview’ mode and the control palettes to make your adjustments
or select presets, move on if necessary to subsequent images, and then click ‘start batch’
to begin processing. Once completed, you can use DxO Viewer to see the results.
The ‘Key Controls’ workspace offers just as much simplicity in use as the ‘Fully
Automatic’ mode, as all corrections can still be made fully automatically, but this mode
also allows tweaking of a few of the most commonly-required settings.
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W orkspace anatom y
Mac Version
A toolbar…
WARNING
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Windows Version
a toolbar…
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New in version 3.5, it is now possible to split the workspace window into two ‘panes’, so
that the thumbnail images can be displayed alongside the main preview image. The
various options for workspace layout are accessed using the ‘Layout’ button on the main
toolbar, which opens a drop-down sub-menu (the same menu is also available from the
‘View’ menu); according to your individual preference, the thumbnail pane (re-sizable)
can be located at the top or bottom of the screen, or on the left- or right-hand sides. Of
course, the single-pane ‘thumbnails only’ and ‘preview only’ displays are still available,
just as in previous versions. Do note that in the specific case of a multi-image selection,
the preview pane will be empty. In the ‘Fully automatic’ workspace, the ‘Thumbnails only’
view alone is available (the other options are grayed-out in the menus).
Toolbars
The buttons along the toolbars all relate to the most frequently-needed commands from
the pull-down menus, and each button provides a tooltip explaining what it does when
you roll the mouse over it. Menu commands that have a corresponding toolbar button are
preceded by an * in the description below.
There are two toolbars: the main one is displayed all the time, but the preview toolbar
only appears when the preview screen is active.
Main window toolbar
Add Images — opens the ‘Add images’ browser window, where you can easily
navigate around your files and folders. We’ll come back to this a bit later.
workspace
Remove ‘don’t process’ — cleans out all images marked as ‘Don’t process’
from your workspace. In fact, it also cleans out any other images that cannot
be processed—for example, corrected images that have already been
processed by DxO.
Rotate left & right — rotates any selected image(s) clockwise or counterclockwise (portrait / landscape formats)
Screen layout — opens a sub-menu where you can choose to view thumbnails
or preview images alone on your workspace, or as 2 panes allowing you to
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view both at the same time—the last 4 menu options enable you to choose
where the thumbnail pane is positioned with respect to the preview pane. Do
note that if multiple images are selected in the thumbnail pane, no preview
image will be displayed.
viewing!
progress window opens (see separate description later) to keep you informed
of progress, but it is otherwise a ‘hands-off’ process from this moment on.
Save settings / Preset manager — options only applicable to ‘Expert Controls’
mode, so these buttons are grayed out here.
Apply preset — allows you to apply any of the various default and custom
presets that you can create and/or modify in ‘Expert Controls’ mode.
Preview window toolbar
Logically enough, on the ‘Preview’ toolbar are grouped a series of tools that operate only
on the Preview image
Shadow clipping
Normal preview
Highlight clipping
This group of 3 associated buttons provides a very useful display tool in the preview
image. The highlight
and shadow clipping
buttons can be used to show respect-
ively which parts of the image are either black crushed or white clipped, which can be
very useful when making decisions about exposure adjustments. Look at the picture
examples below to see how they work. Two important keyboard shortcuts are Altt and Alt
+ Shift, which can be used to update respectively the ‘Highlight clipping’ and ‘Shadow
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clipping’ preview display following correction changes. These make the clipping displays
visible in the main preview image
Normal image
preview
Highlight
clipping image
preview
Shadow clipping
image preview
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Previous / next — for quick navigation backwards and forwards through a
sequence of selected images; these buttons are available in ‘preview only’
mode (in 2-pane mode, they are grayed out)
Another group of 3 associated (and mutually canceling) buttons, the first 2 of which
operate in association with the ‘Zoom’ correction tab (see description later).
‘Eye-dropper’ tool — click white / gray point
Zoom
Crop
The ‘WB picker’ button
enables the ‘eye-dropper’ tool, used to select an area of pixels
to be used as a reference for correcting the white balance of the whole image.
The ‘Zoom’ button
activates a rectangular crop of a section of the image for detailed
previewing of certain functions.
And finally, the ‘Crop’ button
(a new feature in version 3.5) makes it possible to crop
images—checking the ‘enable’ box activates the ‘ratio’ box, where you can select ‘No
Ratio’ (i.e. freely-adjustable proportions), constrain the image proportions to ‘Original’
(i.e. the same as shot), a selection of numeric values, or ‘Custom’, which brings up an
edit box for you to enter integer values for aspect ratio.
Enabling ‘Crop’ displays a scalable, movable rectangular box on the image to indicate the
crop outline. You can adjust the edges of this box by using the mouse (anywhere along
the edge, not just on the handles). The magnified zoom image shows the exact position
of the mouse pointer, allowing you to perform extremely accurate cropping. If you place
the mouse within the crop area, but not near one of the edges, the mouse pointer turns
into a ‘hand’ tool that allows you to move the re-sized rectangle around as a whole.
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As noted in the relevant section, the ‘Histogram’ tool works from the contents of the
‘crop’ box (if enabled), which makes it a useful additional analytical tool.
Preview manager
This button opens a dialogue box with check boxes to enable / disable previewing of
Distortion, Vignetting, DxO Lighting, HSL, Tone curve, and Lateral chromatic aberration
corrections. To save preview refresh time, you may at times wish to suspend previewing
of certain corrections. Do note that the first two options will be grayed out on the preview
panel if even one image is included in your selection for which the appropriate lens
correction module is not available. Note also that lateral chromatic aberration is now
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included here because, in the event that previewing of geometric distortion has not been
enabled, the chromatic aberration correction alone can introduce a slight image zoom,
and hence mild cropping, which it is clearly important to show in the preview image.
WORKSPACE TIP
As you move a correction slider, the current correction will be applied to the last-
corrected preview image (in other words, each correction preview builds upon the
previous one), either ‘live’ as you move it, or only once you have released the mouse
button (where processing time is significant). So certain corrections may not appear
to be having any visible effect, until the mouse button is released. Note also that
certain corrections are never shown in the preview image (see ‘Zoom’ tab below).
M enus
buttons:
*Add / * Remove images—the first step in any work session will always be to add the
images you wish to preview for processing onto the workspace; the Add command
[Ctrl + O] opens a browser window where you can select single or multiple images, and
transfer them onto your workspace, where they appear as thumbnails. Remove image(s)
[Ctrl + Del] is self-explanatory, and there is also * Remove “don’t process” images
[Ctrl + Backspace] that allows you to automatically remove all images that you have
selected not to process, in order to make your workspace less cluttered. Select all images
[Ctrl + A] does just what you’d expect. The Delete files command sends unwanted files to
the recycle bin.
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TIP
When you select the ‘Add images’ command (or use the keyboard shortcut or toolbar
button), a whole new ‘Add images’ window opens to let you find and select the image
file(s) you want to add. If you hover the mouse over a filename, a tooltip will be displayed
giving certain key image properties. If you select multiple images to be added, a progress
bar will appear at the bottom left of the status bar, along with a ‘Stop’ button to allow
you to cancel loading of the images.
management that much easier. The ‘Add images’ browser window is divided into two
resizable panes—the classic left-hand pane showing the tree structure of your disk, and
the right-hand pane showing the selected folder as either thumbnails of your images, or
as the usual list of file details.
Note that the Mac version is quite different, please refer to ‘Add images’ in the ‘Expert
Controls’ chapter for a full description.
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On this ‘Add images’ toolbar (and the same commands are available from the ‘File’ and
‘View’ menus), you will find:
Select all images
images.
These last two make it easy to pre-select images for adding to the main
workspace.
regenerate the thumbnails each time…
Note that, to economize on processing, thumbnail images are only produced if thumbnail
display is actually selected; hence the first time you switch over from details listing to
thumbnails, there will be a short delay as the images are computed. If a folder contains
very many image files, DxO will display a message while it checks which ones are usable
image files.
Also, if you have selected to filter out ‘already processed’ images, DxO detects them in a
separate pass, so there thumbnails will appear briefly, only to disappear again if the filter
is in use.
In ‘Key Controls’ mode, images you add will be displayed initially as a series of thumb-
nails on your ‘workspace’, and once you have added one or more images, you can select /
deselect them with a single left-click [toggles]—selected images are shown with a heavier
frame round them (as we’ll be seeing later, the color of this frame can be set under the
Misc. tab of the ‘Preferences’ menu). As usual, Ctrl + left click lets you select multiple
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images at the same time, while Shift + left click lets you select a range of adjacent images.
You can drag-&-drop them to change the order around.
-
The image cannot be processed because it has already been processed using DxO
Optics Pro—or because the image is a Raw file format that is not supported
Either the image file is corrupted, or the format is unreadable; the image will not be
processed
In these last two cases, you will probably want to either remove these images from your
workspace, or select them and choose “Don’t process” from the Workflow menu (see
below), in which case the image will display the “Don’t process” icon in its top left-hand
corner.
Raw image, camera profile information is available, but not the lens correction module
required: only raw conversion, noise reduction, DxO Lighting, USM sharpness and ICC
color space are available, no optical corrections will be applied
JPEG image, lens correction module is missing, but noise profile is available: only noise
reduction, WB, Tone Curve, HSL, USM sharpness and DxO Lighting corrections are
available
JPEG image, lens correction module is missing, and noise profile is not available: WB,
Tone Curve, USM sharpness and DxO Lighting are the only corrections available.
Missing focus: you need to enter focusing distance in order to perform optical correct-
ions; otherwise, one or more of the lens/camera-dependent optical corrections will not
be performed
‘Are you Sure’ — image has been modified using third-party software, but it can be
processed by DxO, with no performance guarantee. (Please refer to the ‘Tip’ at the end of
this section)
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Below each thumbnail image is displayed its filename, together with the type of image
(JPEG or Raw).
Except in the case of corrupted, unreadable or “cannot be processed” files, the image will
also be marked with a checkmark, indicating that the image is ready to be processed, or
is an already processed image where at least one setting has been altered.
At the end of processing, after viewing processed images in the DxO Viewer (described
later), next time you return to your workspace, the thumbnail icons will be updated to
reflect the images’ new status.
The status bar at the bottom of the screen gives information about a selected image, or
about any image if you hover the mouse over it. On the left is displayed the full path
name for the image file, in the center are details of the camera and lens used to shoot the
picture (where this information is available), or a note to the effect that it is an alreadyprocessed image.
The Workflow menu too is basically the same as for the other two workspaces:
* Mark image as “process” [F12] / “don’t process” [F11] — enable you to skip processing
of selected images.
Clearly, if only one image has been placed on the workspace, these two commands will be
mutually exclusive.
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The Wizard offers an introductory text that helps you pick the right mode for your need
by recapping on the uses of the three workspace modes, with a radio button for each.
This wizard is displayed automatically once only, the very first time you run the program.
The ‘Preferences’ command and shortcut [Ctrl + P] access adjustments to certain overall
working parameters: version 3.5 has some additions here, please see dedicated
paragraph later
The Image menu offers the possibility to rotate your image * left (counter-clockwise) [Ctrl
+ L] or * right (clockwise) [Ctrl + R] in order to be able to view portrait images with the
correct orientation.
In the ‘Key Controls’ workspace, version 3.5’s new View menu now offers direct access to
the DxO Viewer (see later dedicated chapter for details)—also available via the
toolbar
button and the Ctrl + W shortcut, for before/after viewing of corrected images. Note that
until processing has been completed, DxO Viewer will only be able to display already-
processed images whose files still exist in the chosen output file location. An error
message will be displayed if you attempt to open the Viewer before you have any corrected images for viewing!
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Layout — opens a sub-menu where you can choose to view thumbnails or preview images
alone on your workspace, or as 2 panes allowing you to view both at the same time—the
last 4 menu options enable you to choose where the thumbnail pane is positioned with
respect to the preview pane. Do note that if multiple images are selected in the thumbnail
pane, no preview image will be displayed.
Filters — opens a sub-menu with check boxes allowing you to enable display of “Do not
process”, “Ready to process” and “Already processed” images. Very useful to avoid a
cluttered workspace after initial viewing!
Sort — opens a sub-menu offering options to either leave thumbnail images unsorted (i.e.
in the order as loaded), or to sort them by file date or name, or group them by camera
body or lens type.
The View menu also includes * Previous / * Next image commands, once again available
as keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl + Æ for next and Ctrl + Å for previous.
The Help menu offers access to the complete help file (i.e. this User Manual) [F1], plus
details of the various module options installed [Ctrl + M], and an About… information
screen containing information about the exact software version, important if you need to
contact DxO Technical Support. There’s also a command you can click, and the software
will check automatically for updates.
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TIP
DxO Optics Pro is designed to correct images straight out of your camera. This means
that images that have been previously corrected with other software will not be
accepted by Optics Pro for correction.
Please check the on-line FAQ at http://support.dxo.com/ for the most recent updates
related to this requirement. DxO Optics Pro has been designed to be at the very
beginning of the workflow, at the point images are copied from the card reader or
camera.
Any of the following circumstances will prevent images being accepted for DxO Optics
Pro processing:
– The image has been modified and the MakerNote (manufacturer-specific part of the
EXIF metadata) is missing;
A new feature in version 3.5 is the ability to process images that have been previously
processed by certain authorized third-party applications (so far, the list includes Picture
Project® and Nikon Capture®) that leave the EXIF MakerNote intact. Such images can
be processed by DxO Optics Pro, but the results performance cannot be guaranteed.
For this reason, these images are marked with an
DxO Optics Pro itself strives to leave as much as possible of the metadata (EXIF,
MakerNote, IPTC, XMP) untouched. This means that you should be able to use your other
image processing/editing software even after the images have been processed by DxO
Optics Pro.
DxO Optics Pro automatically rotates the images if you use the autorotate facility of
your camera. There is no need for additional software for this particular step.
Preferences
The ‘Workspace’ menu ‘Preferences’ command and shortcut [Ctrl + P] access adjustments
to certain overall working parameters:
Misc. tab
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Under this miscellaneous tab, combo-boxes let you select the sizes of both thumbnail
and preview images, select the working language, go on line to check for availability of
new DxO Correction Modules or software updates (with a check-box offering the option
to do this automatically at each start-up), choose whether you prefer to use metric or
imperial units for measurements, and disable the jingle that plays over the splash screen
when the program starts.
Changes made to language or preview size only come into effect the next time you start
the program, so if you want them to take effect immediately, you will need to exit and restart the program.
WORKSPACE TIP
Appearance tab
This tab allows you to choose your own colors for the workspace backgrounds, image
outlines and various other display elements. Click on any item to display its current color,
and then if you want to change it, click on the current color button; you will be presented
with a typical Windows color palette to choose from, or the option to create a set of
customized colors of your own.
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Viewer tab
Under the ‘Viewer’ tab, radio buttons let you choose to use the DxO Viewer (the default
setting), or an external viewing utility. A combo box allows you to select the order in
which you want DxO Viewer to present your images when it first opens, with the options
of Input/Output (before/after) and Output/Input (after/before), as well as Output (after)
alone. This only sets the initial presentation—once in Viewer, local commands enable you
to toggle at will between the two versions of your images, unless of course you have
selected ‘Output’ alone.
images will be available only at the end of processing the whole batch. In practice, this is
likely to save time when processing large batches of images.
Multiprocessing tab
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The multiprocessing tab offers some speed-up options for those with suitably-equipped
computers.
The multiprocessing combo box lets you select how many processing tasks you want to
run simultaneously during batch processing and cache generation. The first figure shows
how many processes to enable, while the second figure indicates how many (logical)
processors your system has available. If your system has more than one logical processor,
it makes sense to enable as many processes as there are processors available. But it is
important to note that image processing uses up a lot of memory, especially with larger
images (over 8 M pixels). The amount of RAM used will be around 10× the image size for
JPEGs, and as much as 20× for raw images.
Another speed-up feature is the disk cache, which allows DxO Viewer to pre-compute
“before” raw images; this speeds up refresh time when using the Viewer to display
before / after images. You can set here how much disk space to allocate to the cache,
and the directory you’d like the system to use for it. The Browse button opens a browser
window where you can choose an existing directory or create a new one.
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Settings
Once you have added all the batch of images for processing onto the workspace, just as
for the Fully Automatic mode, the first step is obviously to select one or more images you
wish to process. In Key Controls mode, you can then use the selection of most commonly
required controls available to adjust your image(s), and if you wish, you can then copy
and paste settings (from the Workflow menu, or by right-clicking on a selected image to
bring up a contextual menu), so as to apply the same settings to one or more group(s) of
images, or call up already-created preset(s) that you’ve previously saved as a custom
preset in the ‘Expert Controls’ mode (see later chapter). In all these cases, you can choose
to paste all of the settings onto one or more selected images, or to paste only a selection
from the settings. So, for example, you might choose a group of, say, six related images,
create a pattern of settings to apply to all of them, and then copy and paste these
settings, perhaps leaving out certain ones, onto a further group or groups of images. You
can begin to see just what a powerful, flexible feature this is!
K ey C ontrols palette
Now, let’s take a closer look at the palette of all-important correction controls, to be
found under the Workspace menu. Just before we do, though, one general point—on all
panels where a slider is accompanied by an entry box, after you type in a correction value
directly, you must press ‘Enter’ so that this value will be taken into account. Correction
settings can be performed in any order, but we have listed them here in a sequence that
offers a logical workflow; once you know how to handle each type of correction, of course
you’re free to adjust the settings in any order you like. Users of earlier versions will note
that in version 3.5, the main workspace can be used in twin-pane ‘split-screen’, and that
the toolbar includes new buttons for Layout, and a new toolbar for the Preview window—
please see the Toolbar and Menu descriptions for full details.
As long as you have at least one image already selected, this palette is displayed as soon
as you select ‘Key Controls’ mode, and can be hidden at any time by closing the window
using the × at the top right corner, or the ‘Hide controls’ command from the Workspace
menu, and revealed again by selecting ‘Show controls’. The palette consists of five
separate tabs, for Corrections, Histogram, Zoom, Workflow, and Image information
respectively. In the Workspace menu, these are checked in turn when they are the active
feature, and unchecked when in the background. You can move swiftly from one to the
other using the keyboard shortcuts, Ctrl + F1 to F5 respectively. You can also hide or
show the whole control palette from this menu.
Under the Corrections tab, the DxO Optics panel has check boxes for two new features,
Chromatic aberration (overall + purple fringing) and Max Image. In addition, the ‘Key
controls’ mode new Preview toolbar carries buttons for Crop and Preview management—
again, please refer to the fuller descriptions of these under Toolbars and Menus.
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Once the control palette is displayed on your workspace, you can move it around as a
whole, or use your mouse to drag-&-drop any one or more tabs to different parts of the
window (to pick them up, you’ll need to click quite accurately on the actual tab itself, and
not the title bar!). As we’ll be seeing a bit later, it is often helpful to keep certain tabs
open whilst working with others. As you click on each tab, it comes to the front and
becomes active, and the others move behind. The layout of your palettes is remembered
from one session to the next, so that next time you open the program they will be
displayed in the same format as you left them, provided of course that you have not
changed display mode (from twin to single-screen, for example); if the stored display
layout cannot be used, then a default layout is provided.
WORKSPACE TIP
At first start-up, the DxO workspace is organized with the palettes stacked, with tabs,
and the histogram palette to the fore. This way, you can see everything on a single
screen, merely opening palettes as and when needed. But if you are working on two
separate screens, you can keep all the palettes open at once, arranging them to suit
your preference.
By clicking on any of the tabs, you can drag-&-drop it anywhere on your screen; once
it is separated from the other tabs, you can open and close it at will, thus enabling
you to keep open several at once if you so wish, but also letting you organize your
workspace to be as uncluttered as possible. To re-stack the tabs, pick each tab up by
You
can (not
shrink
anytitle
tab bar!)
by clicking
on its titleitbar;
shrunk, you can expand it by
its tab
by the
and drag-&-drop
ontoonce
the stack.
clicking again on the title bar. You can also use Ctrl + function keys F1 to F5 to bring any
tab to the fore. Certain tabs have panels within them, and some of these panels have a
box (checked by default) that enables them; if you uncheck this box, this particular
correction algorithm will not be applied, and so logically enough, the panel will not open
and its controls will not be accessible. Under any given tab, F4 and F5 respectively open
and close all the panels.
If a particular parameter has been previously adjusted in ‘Expert Controls’ mode that is
not adjustable in ‘Key Controls’, the header for the relevant panel in the ‘Key Controls’
workspace is highlighted to indicate that this is the case; to make further adjustments to
this parameter, you’ll need to switch over to ‘Expert Controls’ mode.
Just as for the Fully Automatic mode, the first step is obviously to select one or more
images you wish to process. In Key Controls mode, you can then use the controls
available to adjust certain key characteristics of your image(s), and if you wish, you can
then copy and paste settings (from the Workflow menu, or by right-clicking on a selected
image to bring up a contextual menu), so as to apply the same settings to one or more
group(s) of images, or call up already-created preset(s). In all these cases, you can
choose to paste all of the settings onto one or more selected images, or to paste only a
selection from the settings. So, for example, you might choose a group of, say, six
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related images, create a pattern of settings to apply to all of them, and then copy and
paste these settings, perhaps leaving out certain ones, onto a further group or groups of
images. You can begin to see just what a powerful, flexible feature this is!
Let’s now go through the five tabs of this palette window one by one and see how they
work with examples. Before we move onto the actual corrections, let’s first look at two
tabs offering tools that are likely to be so useful, you’ll probably want to keep them open
on your workspace while using the other tools.
Histogram tab
[Ctrl+F2]
You’ll no doubt already be familiar with the histogram display that shows the distribution
of tonal values in the three color channels, with black on the left and white on the right.
A handy new feature in version 3.5 is that the histogram is calculated on the cropped
area of the image (if the crop facility is enabled). Although this of course means you must
be careful when interpreting the histogram if you have selected ‘crop’, it has the immense
advantage that you can perform a more detailed histogram analysis of even quite a small
part of the image, simply by selecting a small crop ‘sampling’ area, which you can then
move around as required in the image.
It’s also worth noting that the histogram is calculated in the output color space; so if you
have changed this, the results will be reflected in your histogram display, even if they are
not necessarily visible in the Preview image (remember, preview images are always
displayed with the sRGB color space, whatever setting you may have selected).
Note for v3 users: The ‘display clipping’ buttons have been updated and are now located
on the ‘Preview’ toolbar.
You’ll almost certainly find it very helpful to keep the Histogram tab open while you’re
working with the other tools, since it very often gives you a good idea of exactly what’s
going on. To do this, you’ll need to drag-&-drop it with your mouse onto another part of
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the screen, and once it is away from its home palette, it will then stay open even when
you access another tab. And the same goes for the next tab we’re going to look at too.
Zoom tab
[Ctrl+F3]
This important feature is rather complicated to explain, so an explanation with pictures is
in order. We mustn’t forget that the normal preview image only shows an approximation
of some of the corrections to be applied (White Balance, Exposure, rough demosaicing,
Distortion,
Vignetting,
Tone
Curve,
Lighting,
Lateral
chromatic
aberration,
Hue/Saturation/Luminance), whilst other key corrections like noise reduction, lateral
chromatic aberration, true demosaicing, and sharpness processing are not previewed.
Hence why this ‘zoom’ function is important, as it displays a cropped section of the
image with all the final processing applied.
The zoom tab opens a small zoom window, the function and operation of which depends
on the selection of the three buttons on the preview toolbar:
Zoom
Crop
First, let’s look at this function as it is used for white balance.
White balance
With the white balance tool activated, as you move the mouse pointer (eye-dropper tool)
around in the main image, the image in the magnified sections moves in such a way that
the center cross indicates the exact pointer position; and the RGB values of the selected
point are shown in the bottom right-hand corner of the status bar. For greater precision,
you can use the slider at the bottom to increase the magnification in four steps up to
400%—note that the white balance reference sample is an average of several screen
pixels at the pointer position, so the more you zoom in, the more tightly your define the
white balance reference pixels.
As you move the pointer around in the main image, the white balance of the ‘If clicked’
right-hand preview image changes to reflect the white balance that would be produced
by the selected ‘neutral’ pixels, giving a ‘before’ and ‘after’ view of the white balance.
Clicking at any point will update the white balance of the main image to match that of the
‘If clicked’ display. You can press the Alt key to temporarily disable the eye-dropper tool
and ‘stick down’ the zoomed area.
Here’s a real image that illustrates how this works; you may find it easier if you try this
out for yourself.
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Zoom
Activating the zoom tool changes the display to a single rectangle showing a zoomed-in
section of the main image, where it is indicated by a green frame that you can move
around by clicking on it using the hand tool that appears when you hover the mouse over
the framed area. The size of this zoomed crop from the main image can be adjusted (in
steps of 100 %) by dragging and dropping the slider from 100% (i.e. actual size) to 400%.
The importance of this ‘actual-size’ sample facility cannot be over-emphasized; although
the preview image does give a very good idea of the final result you will get, the image
size is limited, is sub-sampled to speed up preview processing, and not all corrections
are applied. But this actual-size zoomed image is processed exactly as your final image,
and so shows you precisely the effect you’ll get. This is vital in order to be able to adjust
some of the corrections that we’re about to look at more closely below (DxO Noise), and
later in the ‘Expert Controls’ workspace description (DxO Lens Softness and USM). In this
mode, you can access the white balance eye-dropper tool by holding down the Ctrl key as
you move the pointer around, and as usual, left-clicking will adopt the current pointer
position as a new neutral white balance reference.
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Crop
crop outline.
You can adjust the edges of this box by using the mouse (anywhere along the edge, not
just on the handles). The magnified zoom image shows the exact position of the mouse
pointer, allowing you to perform extremely accurate cropping. If you place the mouse
within the crop area, but not near one of the edges, the mouse pointer turns into a ‘hand’
tool that allows you to move the re-sized rectangle around as a whole.
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Corrections tab
[Ctrl+F1]
Under this tab you’ll find five panels for the key correction controls that can be adjusted
in this mode. Just before we take a look at them, though, one general point—on all panels
where a slider is accompanied by an edit box, after you type in a correction value directly,
you must press ‘Enter’ so that this value will be taken into account.
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WORKSPACE TIP
certain corrections are never shown in the preview image (see ‘Zoom’ tab below).
White Balance
Note that when an image is selected, the White Balance panel (and its header) will change
according to whether it is a raw or other file; in the case of raw conversion, true white
balance adjustment is possible, whereas in processing other images, the white balance
adjustment is achieved slightly differently.
Raw version
At the top of the White Balance (RAW) panel is a combo box, offering ‘Original’ (i.e. uses
the values read from the image file’s EXIF header), a series of presets for ‘standard’
lighting conditions (Daylight / Cloudy / Tungsten / Fluorescent / Flash / Shade), and a
‘Custom’ position for manual adjustment. Starting out from any one of these presets, you
can make adjustments with the color Temperature and Tint sliders—as soon as a slider is
moved, the label (Custom) appears alongside its title, to show that the setting has been
adjusted.
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The ‘Custom’ position corresponds to a DxO average calibration, but it may also
represent camera settings of AWB [auto white balance] or Manual Temp [color
temperature set manually in the camera by the user]
The top slider adjusts the color ‘Temperature’—basically, it swings the balance of the red
and blue channels, whilst leaving the green untouched. Moving the slider to the right
increases the color temperature, moving it to the left decreases it. The same result can be
achieved by typing in a figure for the color temperature and pressing ‘Enter’. The range is
from 2,000 K to 20,000 K.
Note that the effect on the image is to make it warmer with increasing color temperature,
and cooler with decreasing; although this might at first appear counter-intuitive, we need
to remember that this is correcting the color balance as if the picture had been shot with
this color temperature lighting in the first place. Imagine, for example, that a picture has
been taken by tungsten artificial light, but with the camera accidentally set to ‘daylight’;
the resulting image will appear too orange. Moving the slider to the left, towards a lower
K value more appropriate for the artificial light actually used, will cool the image,
correcting the orange cast.
The lower slider adjusts the ‘Tint’—in this case, swinging the color balance between blue
and green, leaving the red untouched. Moving the slider to the left (or entering a negative
number) makes the image greener, moving it to the right or entering a positive number
makes it bluer. The range runs from +100 to –100.
As with all the sliders in Optics Pro, clicking anywhere on the slider bar to one side or the
other of the slider itself will move the slider in that direction by a fixed increment; in the
case of the color temperature, this is in steps of 500 K, while the tint slider moves in
steps of 25.
TIP
The way the software performs White Balance adjustment differs slightly between
processing raw and RGB images (JPEG and TIFF ). Using raw images allows greatest
freedom of white balance adjustment, but you need to exercise care when correcting
RGB files, as large amounts of correction can lead to undesirable artifacts (banding in
high-key areas / posterization in shadows).
Let’s take a look at the operation of these two controls using some actual pictures (in this
case, raw images).
Here in the middle is the picture as shot, and to the left and right, the effects of shifting
the color temperature slider left and right respectively:
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And here is the same picture, this time with the tint control adjusted:
Notice how the mouse pointer turns into an eye-dropper tool when you move it over the
preview image; this powerful tool lets you pick a neutral area of the image to be taken as
a white reference. This should be a fairly light grey tone, but avoid clipped highlights, as
the results can be very unpredictable! Note that the eye-dropper ‘looks’ at the average of
a number of screen pixels, so you should also avoid transition areas that might yield
unwanted errors. Simply position the pointer over the required area, and left-click to
white balance for this point; at any time, you can re-select ‘Original’ from the pull-down
menu in order to cancel the changes and revert to the original white balance. Immediately
you click on a gray point to adjust the white balance, the legend (Custom) is automatically
added to the slider titles. The eye-dropper tool can be temporarily disabled using the Alt
key (toggles); as soon as you right-click anywhere in the image, it comes back (but
without changing the white balance, or if you left click, it comes back and changes the
white balance at the same time).
It’s perhaps important here to explain a little about this idea of applying ‘custom’ settings to defined presets. In their quest for ever-more-faithful colorimetry, certain camera
manufacturers generate the color using different calculation matrices for each of the
defined lighting conditions represented in DxO by these presets, and as a result, DxO
itself uses different color matrices. In order to avoid any possibility of color anomalies, it
is important that images are processed using the settings appropriate for the original
taking selection. However, it is clear that users may still want to ‘tweak’ adjustments
around these preset positions, and so it is for this reason that it has been made possible
to ‘customize’ the settings under any given preset.
RGB Version
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If the image selected is an already-converted RGB file, a slightly different White Balance
panel is displayed. In this case, the full range of adjustments as for raw images is not
available, and there is just a single slider to adjust the overall balance of the image—
cooler to the left, warmer to the right. Extreme settings in this RGB mode need to be used
with care, in order to avoid artifacts that are the result of limitations in the RGB formats
themselves. As before, clicking on a gray point in the image with the eye-dropper tool
will adjust the overall white balance so as to make this point neutral, and the selection in
the combo box will change automatically, this time to ‘Click white/gray point’.
TIP
DxO’s powerful tone curve, lighting correction and noise reduction features mean
you’ll be able to recover an astonishing amount of shadow detail that in conventional
photography would likely have been lost (this concerns both raw and RGB images).
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Exposure compensation
This slider works just as you might expect—moving it to the right (or entering a positive
Ev number into the edit box) increases the exposure, to the left (or a negative Ev number)
reduces it. The range is from +4.00 Ev to –4.00 Ev, and clicking moves the slider in steps
of 0.50 Ev.
During exposure adjustments, you may well find it helpful to use the highlight / shadow
clipping display, accessible using the usual Shift + Ctrl / Alt keyboard shortcuts. It’s
important to note that shadow and highlight clipping displays are computed in the final
output color space, and hence these displays, and any adjustments performed based on
them, will be affected if the output color space is subsequently changed (see the later
description of ‘Output color space’ under the ‘Output settings' tab).
When processing a raw image, the Highlight recovery box will be checked by default,
disabling the manual settings; to make an adjustment, you need to uncheck the Highlight
recovery box. Note that when processing an RGB image, highlight recovery is not
available, and so the check box is grayed out.
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WHAT IS HIGHLIGHT RECOVERY?
Typical Digital SLR sensors have a 12-bit dynamic range—this means they use 4096
gray levels to describe an image, while JPEG images only use 8 bits—256 gray levels.
Traditionally, 12-bit raw images are converted to 8 bits using a “tone curve” that
typically reduces dynamics in the highlights. Certain color elements may also lose
highlight information. The aim of Highlight Recovery is to overcome this problem.
DxO Optics Pro 3.5 Highlight Recovery automatically sets the Ev Bias slider to a
negative value, to bring the out-of-range highlight information within the available
8-bit dynamic range, and then adjusts the lighting gamma to restore overall image
brightness as far as is possible, always seeking for the best balance between recovery
of the highlights and preservation of the general exposure of the scene. Note that if
Gamma [on Brightness panel, DxO Lighting / Expert tab] has been set to ‘Manual’ (i.e.
‘Auto’ box unchecked), it will have to be set manually to compensate for the negative
Ev bias when Highlight recovery is used. When it is in auto mode, the gamma is
computed taking the highlight recovery effect into account.
For some images, better results may be obtained by manually tuning Ev Bias and
lighting parameters. The simplest way is to set lighting to ‘auto’ and then tune the Ev
Bias.
Expert users will first tune the Ev Bias to recover highlights and then play with
lighting parameters, and if necessary HSL lightness to find the best compromise. DxO
Lighting’s local adaptation avoids the need for tiresome masking techniques.
In some images, Highlight Recovery might induce changes in the overall brightness,
contrast and color saturation; such situations can usually be rectified using the HSL
controls.
For JPEG images, a similar effect can be obtained manually, using a combination of
the DxO Lighting and Exposure compensation controls.
However, if Highlight recovery is set to anything other than ‘None’, the manual slider is
disabled. In this case, you can select one of three strengths of automatic highlight re-
covery adjustment (Slight, Medium, Strong) in the combo box, depending on your image
requirements.
A very dark image containing a bright area (for example, a backlit shot) requires
considerable under-exposure in order to preserve highlight detail, which will make the
overall image too dark. Automatic contrast control is not optimized for this type of
image—the output image may not necessarily have been lightened enough to bring out
the detail in the darker areas. For this reason, it is advisable to change to manual mode in
DxO Lighting in order to find a better settings compromise.
Notice the effect on the picture below of a small increase to correct for initial slight
under-exposure. Clearly, this makes it possible to err on the side of under-exposing, to
allow for the reduced ‘headroom’ of digital images and avoid clipping highlight detail,
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with the possibility of choosing the exact exposure setting you prefer during image
processing.
Original Image
With Highlight Recovery
Note how the use of ‘Highlight recovery’ produces a slight reduction in exposure and
retrieves highlight detail that had appeared to be ‘lost’; this is one of the great
advantages of working with raw images, since with an RGB image, once highlights are
‘blown’, there is no possibility of rescuing the lost detail.
TAKING TIP
Compared to traditional film, digital capture is much less tolerant of highlight overexposure; once a highlight has reached digital clipping point, no further detail is
available. Hence it is important to familiarize yourself with the actual ‘raw’ clipping
point of your particular camera, and then adapt your taking habits to suit, holding
back the exposure if necessary to preserve highlight detail.
Saturation
There is a check box to enable correction, and if disabled, the panel does not open (check
box is unchecked).
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In Key Controls mode, saturation alone is available; as usual, the slider can be moved to
the right to increase, or to the left to decrease, the color saturation, or a positive or
negative figure can be entered. The range is from +100 to –100, and clicking moves the
slider in steps of 10.
WHAT IS HSL?
Within equipment, digital images are described using 3 color channels Red, Green and
Blue, but this system is not very user-friendly for making meaningful adjustments.
HSL is an alternative color model, internally based on the same RGB values, but much
easier to work with.
It describes colors in terms of three fundamental parameters:
Hue — what basic color (orange, turquoise, purple, etc.)
Saturation — how strong the color is, from pastel to vibrant
Lightness — how light or dark the color is, from black to white
By making these parameters adjustable, colors can be manipulated for correction or
artistic effect.
And also as usual, the ‘As shot’ button lets you cancel everything and get back to where
you started!
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DxO Optics
Note that this panel will only be displayed if an image is selected for which the lens
correction module is loaded; if the panel is missing, Optics Pro cannot apply its optical
corrections to that particular image.
DXO OPTICS INTRODUCTION
Lens design is always a matter of compromise. Even the most expensive lenses
show a certain amount of image degradation, referred to as aberration, such as
geometric distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration or field-dependent blur. In an
attempt to compensate for these defects, a lens is typically made of several pieces
of glass assembled together in such a way as to partially cancel out each other’s
defects. But this compensation is never perfect. Zoom lenses are even more
complex, as the compensation needs to work at all focal lengths.
The DxO Optics Engine is designed to improve the performance of a lens by
compensating through software the residual defects of the lens itself. For example,
pin-cushion or barrel distortion (as well as more complex distortions) can be
corrected by applying an inverse geometric transform to the digital image. The DxO
Optics Engine works on the principle of creating a detailed model of lens
performance by taking thousands of images with each lens for which a DxO Lens
Module is created. This model – the DxO Lens Module – is then used by the DxO
Optics Engine algorithms to “reverse out” all the defects. This way of working means
the optical corrections are based on the “real-world” defects of the lens, rather than
on estimates, and can be fully automated. The current DxO Optics Engine
correction is fairly exhaustive: chromatic, geometric, axial and field-dependent
aberrations can all be corrected simultaneously, and if desired, automatically.
Correction is automatically adapted within the field and from one picture to another
in accordance with taking conditions (focal length, aperture, etc.)
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In this mode, there is just a single check box to enable / disable optical corrections, and
a second for ‘Max Image’.
In order to maximize the amount of image usable, version 3.5 includes the new ‘Max
frame’ feature; if this box is checked, the image aspect ratio is no longer constrained to
the original proportions as shot, but is allowed to expand outwards
to the largest possible centered rectangle that will fit within the corrected image. In
certain cases, this can result in as much as 40 % extra usable image area!
TAKING TIP
This new feature is going to be of especial interest to users of super-wide / fisheye
lenses, and opens new possibilities for taking panoramic shots—now you can use a
very wide-angle lens, use DxO Optics Pro to correct the inevitable distortion it will
produce, and then make the most of ‘Max frame’ to allow you to crop your image down
to the final wanted proportions. Now you can take panoramic shots in situations where
you couldn’t have before, or at least, not without a great deal more time and effort.
Focusing distance
Certain lens correction modules (distortion, lateral chromatic aberration) need focusing
distance information in order to perform optical corrections. Some cameras do not store
the focusing distance in the EXIF data; if this is the case, the focusing distance panel will
be displayed, and you should manually enter the focusing distance used for the shot, as
accurately as you are able to. A combo box allows you to select either the default ‘not set’
(in this case, distortion and lateral chromatic aberration will not be corrected), or various
distance
ranges, whilst the slider lets you set the distance precisely, or alternatively,
enter the figures in the edit box to the right. Do note that the slider may allow you to
enter a focusing distance that is not actually covered by your lens; in this case, DxO will
use the minimum focusing distance applicable for your lens.
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Note that the units for focusing distance (feet & inches or meters) can be changed in the
‘Miscellaneous’ tab under the ‘Preferences’ menu, accessible via the Workspace pulldown or using the Ctrl+P shortcut.
Focal length
Likewise, in order to optimize optical corrections, a small number of zoom lens correction
modules need more precise focal length information over certain specific parts of their
range than is available from the camera’s EXIF file; if this is the case, the focal length
panel will be displayed, and you should manually enter the focal length the lens was set
at for the shot, as accurately as you are able to. The slider lets you set the distance
precisely, and will be calibrated for the range of focal lengths across which ambiguity
exists for the particular lens in question; click steps in this instance are 50% of the scale
(so too broad to be of much practical value). Alternatively, you can enter the figures in the
edit box to the right.
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DxO Lighting
There is a check box to enable correction, and if disabled (check box is unchecked), the
panel does not open.
DXO LIGHTING INTRODUCTION
This key DxO Optics Pro feature merits a little explanation.
Natural scenes rarely exhibit ideal lighting conditions; light sources are often directional and
sometimes quite harsh. What’s more, when taking pictures we are often more concerned about
capturing the right moment, and pay little attention to potential lighting problems. To
compound the problem, the dynamic range of sensors can’t compete with that of our eyes. All
this can result in some shots exhibiting under-exposed, dark or shadowed regions with missing
details.
To overcome these problems, DxO Labs introduced DxO Lighting, a unique local exposure and
dynamic range optimizer. Automatically replicating analog film techniques known as “dodging
and burning”, DxO Lighting Engine brings out shadow detail of digital image files while
preserving highlights, textures, colors and a natural look.
How does this work?
To a certain degree—basically when the desired image signal is sufficiently above the noise
level—lighting problems can be corrected afterwards, given appropriate image processing.
Simply put, DxO Lighting first breaks the image down into a number of areas in which
luminance values have a certain range; it then processes each of these areas in the most
appropriate manner to reveal detail. In general terms, lightness and tone curve slope are slightly
increased in dark areas to bring out detail, yet avoid the highlight clipping that could occur if
the overall gamma were adjusted.
Pixel-precise image segmentation technology lies at the heart of DxO Lighting, to deliver
automatic local contrast adjustment and thereby reveal hidden detail in dark areas. The local
nature of the adjustment is of course crucial to reveal shadow detail without burning out the
highlights.
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In ‘Key Controls’ mode, there is a simple check box for Auto or manual, with a combo
box offering a choice of Slight, Medium or Strong correction. The manual ‘Correction
strength’ slider is disabled until the Auto box is unchecked. Slider range is from 0 to
150 %, clicking moves it in 10 % steps. There is also an edit box for direct entry.
To try to explain this simply, it is basically like a sophisticated gamma or tone curve
adjustment, affecting mid-tones but leaving highlights and shadows virtually unaltered.
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Look at the effect on the picture below, and compare the histograms:
Original
image
With DxO
Lighting
correction
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DxO Noise
And so we come to the last panel under the Corrections tab, DxO Noise; here too, there is
a check box to enable correction, and if disabled, the panel does not open (check box is
unchecked).
DXO NOISE INTRODUCTION
This is a feature of DxO Optics Pro that merits a little explanation.
DxO Noise is a hardware-model based correction—in other words, the correction
algorithm is specifically tailored by DxO Labs for each camera, and so this correction
will only be performed for images from cameras that have been calibrated by DxO.
More and more cameras are being profiled as time goes by. Generally, DxO Noise
achieves a 2-stop gain in image noise level. So for example, an image shot at 1600
ISO and processed by DxO Noise, will display the noise level of an image shot at 400
ISO. DxO Noise has been specifically designed to retain maximum detail in the
image.
In order to judge the effect of your noise adjustments, it is essential to use the Zoom tool,
which gives an accurate preview of final image quality. To make your adjustments, pick
an area of your image where you can best assess the noise, and then if necessary move
the zoom area around in order to examine other critical areas.
Once again, the only controls are the check box for Auto or manual setting, and a slider
to set the degree of luminance noise correction. Slider range is from 0 to 100 %, clicking
moves it in 10 % steps. There is also an edit box for direct entry.
DxO’s very intelligent noise reduction algorithm operates virtually undetectably on almost
all picture content, but since some softening of certain image areas might sometimes be
apparent, it obviously makes sense to use as low a level of noise reduction as can be
tolerated, given the parameters of the image in question. Version 3.5 offers a real
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improvement in this respect, with refined algorithms to enable as much fine detail as
possible to be preserved, while keeping noise at a very low level.
Look at the zoomed-in sections of picture below, which illustrate the effect of the noise
reduction, particularly visible in the shadow areas.
Without
correction
After
correction
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Image information tab
[Ctrl+F5]
Just two small panels under this tab:
EXIF
Summarizes the EXIF data for the current image. Note that where a number of images are
selected together, any ambiguity in any or all of the EXIF information between them will
result in a display of ???? in its place.
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Output settings tab
[Ctrl+F4]
Output file format
Here’s one of DxO Optics Pro’s really useful time-saving features—not only can you save
in Adobe’s .DNG file format, but you can do so at the same time as saving in JPEG and
TIFF too, if you want. This means that you can batch-process a whole load of images all
in one go, and simultaneously save copies in multiple formats, perhaps for speedy
previewing plus further editing. Do note that .DNG is only available as an output format
for raw input images. This raw in–raw out facility means you can still use your favorite
third-party raw converter if you wish, once your images have been corrected in Optics Pro.
Each of the three tabs for DNG, JPEG and TIFF formats starts off with the same basic
functions. Check the ‘Output in this format’ box under each tab to save your output files
in that format.
All three tabs have an ‘Enable crop’ check box, to support the new ‘Crop’ feature in
version 3.5—for full details of this feature, please see the preview toolbar description.
Note that the ‘Enable crop’ check box on the preview toolbar sets this check box, but it
can also be set / unset here from the Output format tabs—all three tabs share the same
crop enable / disable, so changing the setting on any one tab changes the others too.
In the case of the JPEG and TIFF output format tabs, the size information is updated to
reflect the re-sized image resulting from cropping. When using the new ‘Crop’ feature,
the last-used crop size is initially applied, so the size information may not be up to date
until the new cropped image has been re-calculated for preview. In the case of the ‘Max
image’ feature, the re-sized image is only calculated after correction, so image size data
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will not be displayed, and size settings are not accessible until an image’s corrections
have been calculated for preview—and not at all in ‘thumbnail only’ view.
For JPEG input images, two output file formats are available: TIFF (compressed or uncompressed) or JPEG (with a compression ratio variable from 0–100).
For Raw input images, three output file formats are available: TIFF (8-bit, compressed or
un-compressed, or 16-bit), JPEG (with a compression ratio variable from 0–100) and
Adobe® Digital Negative (DNG).
Saving in DNG, allows you to use the unique features of DxO Optics Pro (DxO
demosaicing, DxO Optics corrections, etc.) while still maintaining a workflow involving
Adobe® Camera Raw or any other DNG-input compliant Raw converter.
You may choose the suffix to be automatically added to filenames of corrected files. You
can either keep the one suggested (“ _DXO”) or create your own, being sure to use only
non-accented characters, figures, and the _, = or . signs. For RAW input images, an
additional suffix “_raw” is automatically added, in order to allow RAW+JPEG processing.
You are not allowed to leave the suffix blank—this is to avoid deletion of original files by
accident.
A check box allows you to overwrite or not existing processed images. If you choose not
to overwrite, and then try to process a previously-corrected image for which the
processed file still exists in the same output directory, upon starting processing, an error
message is returned, and the image will not be processed
Likewise, if you click the radio button ‘in this directory’, the grayed-out ‘Browse’ button
to the right is enabled, and will open a browser window where you can set an alternative
path for saving your corrected images—as mentioned briefly earlier, this is essential if
you’re importing images via a non-recordable medium, since in that case it is not
possible to save output files to the same location as the input files, which will cause
Optics Pro to return an error when you try to process.
In addition, the JPEG and TIFF format tabs invite you to set parameters that are relevant to
those formats. In the case of JPEG, that means the quality slider; the factory default is 100,
on a scale from 0 (maximum compression, so lowest quality, but smallest file size) to 100
(minimum compression, so best quality, but larger file size). Clicking moves the slider in
steps of 10. For best quality, always use the highest setting you can, as appropriate for
your file size requirements—if in doubt, leave the factory default setting. Be wary of using
JPEG compression ratios lower than 70, which create highly visible artifacts. We suggest
you try out several compression ratios and choose the one that best suits your
requirements.
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The TIFF tab offers check boxes for Compress and 8-bit conversion; only check these if
you fully understand their function and relevance to your specific needs, otherwise leave
them unchecked (factory default setting).
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Processing
That completes our tour of the Key Controls palette, so now you are ready to adjust the
settings for your images, and then push the Start button (or use the Ctrl + S keyboard
shortcut, or select the Start batch command from the Workflow menu).
Version 3.5 includes a multi-processing feature that can help speed up batch processing,
if your computer is equipped with multiple (logical) processors. The configuration options
for this new feature can be found under ‘Preferences’ (Workspace menu, or Ctrl + P). Here
are a few general details about processing:
–
images; at the end of these checks, it may be necessary for the user to respond to one
or more questions before processing proper can commence; for example, if there are
images for which the focusing distance has not been set, a dialog box pops up, asking
whether you want to continue without correcting distortion and chromatic aberration,
or cancel the batch to go back and set the focusing distance for these images.
– To improve processing efficiency in the event of multiprocessing, images are always
sorted before processing, so they will not necessarily be processed in thumbnail order
–
being applied, processing may take from just a few seconds to several minutes, or
even longer in the case of slower computers.
–
If the disk cache has been enabled, raw images will be calculated immediately batch
processing finishes, so that converted ‘Before’ images will already be available when
Viewer is launched. Without the disk cache, ‘Before’ images cannot be calculated in
advance, which slows down Viewer launch where large images are involved. This saves
a lot of time at the review stage.
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–
progress. It has a progress bar showing progress of the batch as a whole. The lower
part of the window shows details of the image currently being processed, and its
individual progress. The ‘Skip’ button allows you to skip a particular image, while the
‘Pause’ button lets you pause one or more processes (if multi-processing is
enabled)—this allows you to temporarily free up CPU time if you need to run another
application, for example. In this case, the images awaiting processing are simply
shared out between the other processes still running.
–
Where multi-processing is being used, the lower part of the screen shows progress
information for each process running; up to 4 will be displayed at once—if more are
being used, a vertical scroll bar will allow you to view the others.
–
Once processing is finished, a log screen (common to all the workspaces) is displayed
which will report any problems that might have been encountered, and offers ‘View’
and ‘Done’ buttons.
–
When Raw images have been processed and saved only in DNG format, they cannot be
displayed in DxO Viewer, and so in this case the ‘View’ button will be grayed out.
–
through all your images and compare the corrected versions with the originals. Let’s
take a look at that now…
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D xO View er w indow anatom y
Mac Version
A toolbar…
information
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a toolbar…
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Just like the main DxO Optics Pro screen, the Viewer’s Image menu offers commands for
* Rotate 90° counterclockwise (left) / clockwise (right) [Ctrl + L or R], along with a new
command, * Delete corrected files, which enables you to delete the corrected file for the
current image—for example, if after viewing you decide that you’d like to process an
image again.
The Viewer’s View menu offers commands for * Next / Previous image [also available as
keyboard shortcuts Æ or Ç and Å or È], as well as switching between * Before / After
DxO images [Ctrl + D / Ctrl + F], and also for * Zoom in / out [Ctrl + + or -], * Fit to
window [Ctrl + I], and * Actual size [Ctrl + 1] .
All these same Image and View menu functions are also available via the Toolbar buttons:
Fit to window, and
Actual size. Note that any zoom setting you use will be applied
to both original and corrected images.
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A pair of
After DxO / Before buttons enable you to toggle back and forth between
the original (unprocessed) and corrected versions of your images — also available simply
by right-clicking anywhere in the workspace to toggle between the two [Keyboard
shortcuts: Ctrl + D / Ctrl + F].
allows you to delete selected results files—you might
need to do this, for example, for certain images that you wish to correct again, or in
cases where you have more than one output file format and want to eliminate one or
more of them.
The
workspace.
The bottom status bar displays the filename currently being viewed in the center, and if
you hover the mouse over it, a tooltip displays information about the corrections that
have been applied.
A legend in the bottom left-hand corner confirms whether you’re viewing the original or
corrected image, and indicates if only partial correction has been applied. In some cases,
it may not have been possible to apply all the corrections requested to an image, and
those that have been applied will be indicated here.
Note that if you have resized images as part of your processing, such images will show a
difference in size between the original / corrected images in the Viewer. Normally,
before / after images will appear with their centers aligned, and so will overlay correctly
(unless you have resized them). However, in the specific case where an image corrected
using the ‘Max frame’ feature yields a corrected image that extends outside the original
image boundaries (even after any cropping), the before / after images will be displayed
with their centers re-aligned, which may mean that the overlay is displaced.
After viewing a newly-processed batch of images, when you return to your main DxO
Optics Pro workspace, the thumbnails for that batch will be updated.
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‘EXPERT CONTROLS’
In this chapter, we’re first going to take a look at the basic anatomy of the ‘Expert
Controls’ workspace, then quickly go through the menu commands, toolbar buttons and
corresponding keyboard shortcuts, before taking a look at the various control ‘palettes’,
and finally, at the DxO Viewer that allows you to see the final results of your corrections.
The basic sequence for processing images is always the same: add the images you want
to process onto your workspace (or drag-&-drop from other applications), double-click
on an image to access ‘preview’ mode and the control palettes to make your adjustments
or select presets, move on if necessary to subsequent images, and then click ‘start batch’
to begin processing. Once completed, you can use DxO Viewer to see the results.
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W orkspace anatom y
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A toolbar…
WARNING
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New in version 3.5, it is now possible to split the workspace window into two ‘panes’, so
that the thumbnail images can be displayed alongside the main preview image. The
various options for workspace layout are accessed using the ‘Layout’ button on the main
toolbar, which opens a drop-down sub-menu (the same menu is also available via the
‘View’ menu); according to your individual preference, the thumbnail pane (re-sizable)
can be located at the top or bottom of the screen, or on the left- or right-hand sides. Of
course, the single-pane ‘thumbnails only’ and ‘preview only’ displays are still available,
just as in previous versions. Do note that in the specific case of a multi-image selection,
the preview pane will be empty. In the ‘Fully Automatic’ workspace, the ‘Thumbnails only’
view alone is available (the other options are grayed-out in the menus).
Toolbars
The buttons along the toolbars all relate to the most frequently-needed commands from
the pull-down menus, and each button provides a tooltip explaining what it does when
you roll the mouse over it. Menu commands that have a corresponding toolbar button are
preceded by an * in the description below.
There are two toolbars: the main one is displayed all the time, but the preview toolbar
only appears when the preview screen is active.
Main window toolbar
Add Images — opens the ‘Add images’ browser window, where you can easily
navigate around your files and folders. We’ll come back to this a bit later.
workspace
Remove “don’t process” images — cleans out all images marked as “Don’t
process” from your workspace. In fact, it also cleans out any other images
that cannot be processed—for example, corrected images that have already
been processed by DxO.
Rotate left & right — rotates any selected image(s) clockwise or counterclockwise (portrait / landscape formats)
Screen layout — opens a sub-menu where you can choose to view thumbnails
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or preview images alone on your workspace, or as 2 panes allowing you to
view both at the same time—the last 4 menu options enable you to choose
where the thumbnail pane is positioned with respect to the preview pane. Do
note that if multiple images are selected in the thumbnail pane, no preview
image will be displayed.
viewing!
progress window opens (see separate description later) to keep you informed
of progress, but it is otherwise a ‘hands-off’ process from this moment on.
Save settings
Preset manager
These three buttons access DxO’s powerful preset
Apply preset
features, which we’ll be describing below.
Preset management buttons (see also Workflow menu)
Let’s return now to take a closer look at version 3.5’s improved preset management
facilities, accessed via either the main window toolbar buttons or the commands on the
‘Workflow’ menu (some of which have associated function keys).
Save settings
Preset manager
Select&Apply preset
Here in ‘Expert Controls’ mode is where you can save (and manage) your presets for
subsequent use in the simpler ‘Key Controls’ mode. In all cases, the current preset can be
saved, and once you have a selection of presets saved, you can ‘Apply’ them (also available via the F8 function key), and use the ‘Preset manager’ button to access a dialogue
box where you can change their order in the list, rename, delete, import and export them.
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The ‘Apply setting’ button [
] offers a choice of the default factory preset (cannot be
modified), then there is one (user-)default preset, along with any custom presets that
exist, for application to the current selected image(s).
Clicking on ‘Select and apply’ [
] opens a combo box where you can select a preset (or
the current contents of the clipboard, if you have previously copied a preset to it), and
then use check boxes to select which of the parameters from that preset you wish to
apply to the current image selection; to simplify parameter selection, you can choose to
‘Select all’ or ‘Unselect all’, and then go through the individual check boxes unchecking
(or checking, as the case may be) the ones you don’t (or do) wish to include for this batch.
Having done this, you might even choose to re-save this as a new preset, if you think
these settings may be of use to you again in the future.
In fact, it is probably good practice to start off by saving most of your settings as presets,
in case you want to apply similar settings again later to other images, as it is much less
work than to laboriously go through trying to reproduce settings you’ve used before. It’s
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worth pointing out here that all your settings are saved in a ‘side-car file’ alongside your
original image file, so if at any time you return to an image, it is possible to find out what
settings were last used to process it.
The ‘Presets Management’ window consists of two panes, the left-hand one displaying
the list of available presets, and the right-hand one listing the corrections included in this
preset.
The buttons below (tooltips available by rolling mouse over them) offer move up / move
down of a given preset in the list, rename, delete, import and export preset.
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That completes our tour of the Expert Controls palette, so now you are ready to adjust
the settings for your images, and then push the Start button
(or use the Ctrl + S
keyboard shortcut, or select the ‘Start batch’ command from the Workflow menu).
Preview window toolbar
Logically enough, on the ‘Preview’ toolbar are grouped a series of tools that operate only
on the Preview image
Shadow clipping
Normal preview
Highlight clipping
This group of 3 associated buttons provides a very useful display tool in the preview
image. The highlight
and shadow clipping
buttons can be used to show respect-
ively which parts of the image are either black crushed or white clipped, which can be
very useful when making decisions about exposure adjustments. Look at the picture
examples below to see how they work. Two important keyboard shortcuts are Alt and Alt
+ Shift, which can be used to update respectively the ‘Highlight clipping’ and ‘Shadow
clipping’ preview display following correction changes. These make the clipping displays
visible in the main preview image.
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Normal
image
preview
Highlight
clipping
image
preview
Shadow
clipping
image
preview
Previous / next — for quick navigation backwards and forwards through a
sequence of selected images; these buttons are available in ‘preview only’
mode (in 2-pane mode, they are grayed out)
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WB picker
Zoom 1:1
Crop
The ‘WB picker’ button
enables the ‘eye-dropper’ tool, used to select an area of pixels
to be used as a reference for correcting the white balance of the whole image.
The ‘Zoom’ button
activates a rectangular crop of a section of the image for detailed
previewing of certain functions.
crop outline. You can adjust the edges of this box by using the mouse (anywhere along
the edge, not just on the handles). The magnified zoom image shows the exact position
of the mouse pointer, allowing you to perform extremely accurate cropping. If you place
the mouse within the crop area, but not near one of the edges, the mouse pointer turns
into a ‘hand’ tool that allows you to move the re-sized rectangle around as a whole.
Preview manager
This button opens a dialogue box with check boxes to enable / disable previewing of
Distortion, Vignetting, DxO Lighting, HSL, Tone curve, and Lateral chromatic aberration
corrections. To save preview refresh time, you may at times wish to suspend previewing
of certain corrections. Do note that the first two options will be grayed out on the preview
panel if even one image is included in your selection for which the appropriate lens
correction module is not available. Note also that lateral chromatic aberration is now
included here because, in the event that previewing of geometric distortion has not been
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enabled, the chromatic aberration correction alone can introduce a slight image zoom,
and hence mild cropping, which it is clearly important to show in the preview image.
WORKSPACE TIP
M enus
buttons:
*Add / * Remove images—the first step in any work session will always be to add the
images you wish to preview for processing onto the workspace; the Add command
[Ctrl + O] opens a browser window where you can select single or multiple images, and
transfer them onto your workspace, where they appear as thumbnails. Remove image(s)
[Ctrl + Del] is self-explanatory, and there is also * Remove “don’t process” images
[Ctrl + Backspace] that allows you to automatically remove all images that you have
selected not to process, in order to make your workspace less cluttered. Select all images
[Ctrl + A] does just what you’d expect. The Delete files command sends unwanted files to
the recycle bin.
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TIP
When you select the ‘Add images’ command (or use the keyboard shortcut or toolbar
button), a whole new ‘Add images’ window opens to let you find and select the image
file(s) you want to add. If you hover the mouse over a filename, a tooltip will be displayed
giving certain key image properties. If you select multiple images to be added, a progress
bar will appear at the bottom left of the status bar, along with a ‘Stop’ button to allow
you to cancel loading of the images.
management that much easier. The ‘Add images’ browser window is divided into two
resizable panes—the classic left-hand pane showing the tree structure of your disk, and
the right-hand pane showing the selected folder as either thumbnails of your images, or
as the usual list of file details.
The following description applies specifically to the Windows environment; the Mac
environment will be described below
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On this ‘Add images’ toolbar (and the same commands are available from the ‘File’ and
‘View’ menus), you will find:
Select all images
images.
These last two make it easy to pre-select images for adding to the main workspace
regenerate the thumbnails each time… It is also worth noting that you can
drag-&-drop images, or whole directories, from the ‘Add images’ window to
the main window
Note that, to economize on processing, thumbnail images are only produced if thumbnail
display is actually selected; hence the first time you switch over from details listing to
thumbnails, there will be a short delay as the images are computed. If a folder contains
very many image files, DxO will display a message while it checks which ones are usable
image files.
Also, if you have selected to filter out ‘already processed’ images, DxO detects them in a
separate pass, so there thumbnails will appear briefly, only to disappear again if the filter
is in use.
Add images (Mac OS)
The screenshot below illustrates the ‘Add images’ window under Mac; you will note that it
is quite different, though the functions remain largely the same. It is basically a standard
Mac ‘Open files’ dialogue box. Broad file pre-selection can be done by file type using the
‘Enable’ box, and the usual Mac sort options can be used to sort on various criteria. Note
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that there are no dedicated tool buttons for the various DxO selection operations; you
can select the file(s) to be used using the mouse or arrow keys (multi-selection is
possible in the usual way), then click ‘Open’ to add them to the main DxO window. As
soon as you click on the Open button, the ‘Add images’ window closes and you are
returned to the main DxO workspace. Also note that the thumbnail image is only
calculated and displayed for one selected image at a time. Unlike under Windows, it is
not possible to drag-&-drop files from this window into the main window.
(multi-selection is possible in the usual way: hold down Shift and drag/click to select a
range, and hold down
and click to make multiple individual selections)
In ‘Expert Controls’ mode, images you add will be displayed initially as a series of thumb-
nails on your ‘workspace’, and once you have added one or more images, you can select /
deselect them with a single left-click [toggles]—selected images are shown with a heavier
frame round them (as we’ll be seeing later, the color of this frame can be set under the
Misc. tab of the ‘Preferences’ menu). As usual, Ctrl + left click lets you select multiple
images at the same time, while Shift + left click lets you select a range of adjacent images.
You can drag-&-drop them to change the order around.
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-
The image cannot be processed because it has already been processed using DxO
Optics Pro—or because the image is a Raw file format that is not supported
Either the image file is corrupted, or the format is unreadable; the image will not be
processed
In these last two cases, you will probably want to either remove these images from your
workspace, or select them and choose “Don’t process” from the Workflow menu (see
below), in which case the image will display the “Don’t process” icon in its top left-hand
corner.
Raw image, camera profile information is available, but not the lens correction module
required: only raw conversion, noise reduction, DxO Lighting, USM sharpness and ICC
color space are available, no optical corrections will be applied
JPEG image, lens correction module is missing, but noise profile is available: only noise
reduction, WB, Tone Curve, HSL, USM sharpness and DxO Lighting corrections are
available
JPEG image, lens correction module is missing, and noise profile is not available: WB,
Tone Curve, USM sharpness and DxO Lighting are the only corrections available.
Missing focus: you need to enter focusing distance in order to perform optical correct-
ions; otherwise, one or more of the lens/camera-dependent optical corrections will not
be performed
‘Are you Sure’ — image has been modified using third-party software, but it can be
processed by DxO, with no performance guarantee. (Please refer to the ‘Tip’ at the end of
this section)
Below each thumbnail image is displayed its filename, together with the type of image
(JPEG or Raw).
Except in the case of corrupted, unreadable or “cannot be processed” files, the image will
also be marked with a checkmark, indicating that the image is ready to be processed, or
is an already processed image where at least one setting has been altered.
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At the end of processing, after viewing processed images in the DxO Viewer (described
later), next time you return to your workspace, the thumbnail icons will be updated to
reflect the images’ new status.
The status bar at the bottom of the screen gives information about a selected image, or
about any image if you hover the mouse over it. On the left is displayed the full path
name for the image file, in the center are details of the camera and lens used to shoot the
picture (where this information is available), or a note to the effect that it is an alreadyprocessed image.
The Workflow menu too is basically the same as for the other two workspaces:
* Mark image as “process” [F12] / “don’t process” [F11] — enable you to skip processing
of selected images.
Clearly, if only one image has been placed on the workspace, these two commands will be
mutually exclusive.
The Wizard offers an introductory text that helps you pick the right mode for your need
by recapping on the uses of the three workspace modes, with a radio button for each.
This wizard is displayed automatically once only, the very first time you run the program.
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The ‘Preferences’ command and shortcut [Ctrl + P] access adjustments to certain overall
working parameters; version 3.5 has some additions here, please see dedicated
paragraph later.
The Image menu offers the possibility to rotate your image * left (counter-clockwise) [Ctrl
+ L] or * right (clockwise) [Ctrl + R] in order to be able to view portrait images with the
correct orientation.
In the ‘Key Controls’ workspace, version 3.5’s new View menu now offers direct access to
the DxO Viewer (see later dedicated chapter for details)—also available via the
toolbar
button and the Ctrl + W shortcut, for before/after viewing of corrected images. Note that
until processing has been completed, DxO Viewer will only be able to display already-
processed images whose files still exist in the chosen output file location. An error
message will be displayed if you attempt to open the Viewer before you have any corrected images for viewing!
Layout — opens a sub-menu where you can choose to view thumbnails or preview images
alone on your workspace, or as 2 panes allowing you to view both at the same time—the
last 4 menu options enable you to choose where the thumbnail pane is positioned with
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respect to the preview pane. Do note that if multiple images are selected in the thumbnail
pane, no preview image will be displayed.
Filters — opens a sub-menu with check boxes allowing you to enable display of “Don’t
process”, “Ready to process” and “Already processed” images. Very useful to avoid a
cluttered workspace after initial viewing!
Sort — opens a sub-menu offering options to either leave thumbnail images unsorted (i.e.
in the order as loaded), or to sort them by file date or name, or group them by camera
body or lens type.
The View menu also includes * Previous / * Next image commands, once again available
as keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl + Æ for next and Ctrl + Å for previous.
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TIP
DxO Optics Pro is designed to correct images straight out of your camera. This means that
images that have been previously corrected with other software will not be accepted by Optics
Pro for correction.
Please check the on-line FAQ at http://support.dxo.com/ for the most recent updates related to
this requirement. DxO Optics Pro has been designed to be at the very beginning of the workflow,
at the point images are copied from the card reader or camera.
Any of the following circumstances will prevent images being accepted for DxO Optics Pro
processing:
– The image has been modified and the MakerNote (manufacturer-specific part of the EXIF
metadata) is missing;
A new feature in version 3.5 is the ability to process images that have been previously processed
by certain authorized third-party applications (so far, the list includes Picture Project® and Nikon
Capture®) that leave the EXIF MakerNote intact. Such images can be processed by DxO Optics
Pro, but the results performance cannot be guaranteed. For this reason, these images are
marked with an
DxO Optics Pro itself strives to leave as much as possible of the metadata (EXIF, MakerNote, IPTC,
XMP) untouched. This means that you should be able to use your other image processing/editing
software even after the images have been processed by DxO Optics Pro.
DxO Optics Pro automatically rotates the images if you use the autorotate facility of your
camera. There is no need for additional software for this particular step.
Preferences
The ‘Workspace’ menu ‘Preferences’ command and shortcut [Ctrl + P] access adjustments
to certain overall working parameters, by means of four tabs:
Misc. tab
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Under this miscellaneous tab, combo-boxes let you select the sizes of both thumbnail
and preview images, select the working language, go on line to check for availability of
new DxO Correction Modules or software updates (with a check-box offering the option
to do this automatically at each start-up), choose whether you prefer to use metric or
imperial units for measurements, and disable the jingle that plays over the splash screen
when the program starts.
Changes made to language or preview size only come into effect the next time you start
the program, so if you want them to take effect immediately, you will need to exit and restart the program.
WORKSPACE TIP
Appearance tab
This tab allows you to choose your own colors for the workspace backgrounds, image
outlines and various other display elements. Click on any item to display its current color,
and then if you want to change it, click on the current color button; you will be presented
with a typical Windows color palette to choose from, or the option to create a set of
customized colors of your own.
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Viewer tab
Under the ‘Viewer’ tab, radio buttons let you choose to use the DxO Viewer (the default
setting), or an external viewing utility. A combo box allows you to select the order in
which you want DxO Viewer to present your images when it first opens, with the options
of Input/Output (before/after) and Output/Input (after/before), as well as Output (after)
alone. This only sets the initial presentation—once in Viewer, local commands enable you
to toggle at will between the two versions of your images, unless of course you have
selected ‘Output’ alone.
images will be available only at the end of processing the whole batch. In practice, this is
likely to save time when processing large batches of images.
Multiprocessing tab
The multiprocessing tab offers some speed-up options for those with suitably-equipped
computers.
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The multiprocessing combo box lets you select how many processing tasks you want to
run simultaneously during batch processing and cache generation. The first figure shows
how many processes to enable, while the second figure indicates how many (logical)
processors your system has available. If your system has more than one logical processor,
it makes sense to enable as many processes as there are processors available. But it is
important to note that image processing uses up a lot of memory, especially with larger
images (over 8 M pixels). The amount of RAM used will be around 10× the image size for
JPEGs, and as much as 20× for raw images.
Another speed-up feature is the disk cache, which allows DxO Viewer to pre-compute
“before” raw images; this speeds up refresh time when using the Viewer to display
before / after images. You can set here how much disk space to allocate to the cache,
and the directory you’d like the system to use for it. The Browse button opens a browser
window where you can choose an existing directory or create a new one.
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Settings
Once you have added all the batch of images for processing onto the workspace, just as
for the Fully Automatic mode, the first step is obviously to select one or more images you
wish to process. In Expert Controls mode, you can then use the full range of controls
available to adjust your image(s), and if you wish, you can then copy and paste settings
(from the Workflow menu, or by right-clicking on a selected image to bring up a
contextual menu), so as to apply the same settings to one or more group(s) of images,
call up already-created preset(s), or save a comprehensive group of settings as a custom
preset. In all these cases, you can choose to paste all of the settings onto one or more
selected images, or to paste only a selection from the settings. So, for example, you
might choose a group of, say, six related images, create a pattern of settings to apply to
all of them, and then copy and paste these settings, perhaps leaving out certain ones,
onto a further group or groups of images. You can begin to see just what a powerful,
flexible feature this is!
In addition to all the facilities of the ‘Key Controls’ layout, the ‘Expert Controls’
workspace permits comprehensive adjustments to virtually all the corrections DxO
applies, via an expanded palette that opens as soon as you go into ‘Expert Controls’
mode (as long as you already have at least one image selected). This palette comprises
nine tabs that are also accessible from the ‘Workspace’ menu, and via the keyboard
shortcut Ctrl + F1 – F9. Clicking it in the menu, or pressing the appropriate shortcut,
brings a tab in front of the others to make it active. We’ll be going through all of these in
detail shortly, but first, here’s a quick rundown of the overall ‘Expert Controls’ workspace
anatomy, and the various commands in the pull-down menus and toolbar.
ExpertC ontrols palette
However, if you’re using ‘Expert Controls’ mode, it’s probably because you want to be
able to take over manual control of some or all of the processing features, and for this
you will need to use the palette of nine tool tabs, so let’s now take a closer look at these
all-important correction controls, to be found under the Workspace menu. As long as you
have at least one image already selected, the palette is displayed as soon as you select
‘Expert Controls’ mode. It can be hidden at any time by closing the window using the × at
the top right corner, or selecting ‘Hide controls’ from the Workspace menu, and revealed
again by selecting ‘Show controls’. The palette consists of nine separate tabs, respectively
for Color and Exposure, DxO Optics, DxO Lighting, DxO Noise, Sharpening, Histogram,
Zoom, Image information, and Output settings. In the Workspace menu, these are
checked in turn when they are the active feature, and unchecked when in the background.
You can move swiftly from one to the other using the keyboard shortcuts, Ctrl + F1 – F9
respectively. You can also hide or show the whole control palette from this menu.
Once the control palette is displayed on your workspace, you can move it around as a
whole, or use your mouse to drag-&-drop any one or more tabs to different parts of the
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window (to pick them up, you’ll need to click quite accurately on the actual tab itself, and
not the title bar!). As we’ll be seeing a bit later, it is often helpful to keep certain tabs
open whilst working with others. As you click on each tab, it comes to the front and
becomes active, and the others move behind. The layout of your palettes is remembered
from one session to the next, so that next time you open the program they will be
displayed in the same format as you left them, provided of course that you have not
changed display mode (from twin to single-screen, for example); if the stored display
layout cannot be used, then a default layout is provided.
WORKSPACE TIP
At first start-up, the DxO workspace is organized with the palettes stacked, with tabs,
and the histogram palette to the fore. This way, you can see everything on a single
screen, merely opening palettes as and when needed. But if you are working on two
separate screens, you can keep all the palettes open at once, arranging them to suit
your preference.
By clicking on any of the tabs, you can drag-&-drop it anywhere on your screen; once
it is separated from the other tabs, you can open and close it at will, thus enabling
you to keep open several at once if you so wish, but also letting you organize your
workspace to be as uncluttered as possible. To re-stack the tabs, pick each tab up by
its tab (not by the title bar!) and drag-&-drop it onto the stack.
You can shrink any tab by clicking on its title bar; once shrunk, you can maximize it by
clicking again on the title bar. You can also use Ctrl + function keys F1 – F9 to bring any
tab to the fore. Certain tabs have panels within them, and some of these panels have a
box that enables them; if you uncheck this box, this particular correction algorithm will
not be applied, and so logically enough, the panel will not open and its controls will not
be accessible. Under any given tab, F4 and F5 respectively open and close the panel.
Let’s now go through the nine tabs of this palette window one by one and see how they
work with examples. Before we move on to the actual corrections, let’s first look at three
tabs offering tools that are likely to prove very helpful when making your adjustments:
The remaining two tool tabs are likely to be so useful, you’ll probably want to keep them
open on your workspace while using the other tools.
Histogram tab
[Ctrl+F6]
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You’ll no doubt already be familiar with the histogram display that shows the distribution
of tonal values in the three color channels, with black on the left and white on the right.
A handy new feature in version 3.5 is that the histogram is calculated on the cropped
area of the image (if the crop facility is enabled). Although this of course means you must
be careful when interpreting the histogram if you have selected ‘crop’, it has the immense
advantage that you can perform a more detailed histogram analysis of even quite a small
part of the image, simply by selecting a small crop ‘sampling’ area, which you can then
move around as required in the image.
It’s also worth noting that the histogram is calculated in the output color space; so if you
have changed this, the results will be reflected in your histogram display, even if they are
not necessarily visible in the Preview image (remember, preview images are always
displayed with the sRGB color space, whatever setting you may have selected).
Note for v3 users: The ‘display clipping’ buttons have been updated and are now located
on the ‘Preview’ toolbar.
You’ll almost certainly find it very helpful to keep the Histogram tab open while you’re
working with the other tools, since it very often gives you a good idea of exactly what’s
going on. To do this, you’ll need to drag-&-drop it with your mouse onto another part of
the screen, and once it is away from its home palette, it will then stay open even when
you access another tab. And the same goes for the next tab we’re going to look at too.
Zoom tab
[Ctrl+F7]
This important feature is rather complicated to explain, so an explanation with pictures is
in order. We mustn’t forget that the normal preview image only shows an approximation
of some of the corrections to be applied (White Balance, Exposure, rough demosaicing,
Distortion,
Vignetting,
Tone
Curve,
Lighting,
Lateral
chromatic
aberration,
Hue/Saturation/ Luminance), whilst other key corrections like noise reduction, lateral
chromatic aberration, true demosaicing, and sharpness processing are not previewed.
Hence why this ‘zoom’ function is important, as it displays a cropped section of the
image with all the final processing applied.
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The zoom tab opens a small zoom window, the function and operation of which depends
on the selection of the three buttons on the preview toolbar:
Zoom
Crop
First, let’s look at this function as it is used for white balance.
White balance
With the white balance tool activated, as you move the mouse pointer (eye-dropper tool)
around in the main image, the image in the magnified sections moves in such a way that
the center cross indicates the exact pointer position; and the RGB values of the selected
point are shown in the bottom right-hand corner of the status bar. For greater precision,
you can use the slider at the bottom to increase the magnification in four steps up to
400%—note that the white balance reference sample is an average of several screen
pixels at the pointer position, so the more you zoom in, the more tightly your define the
white balance reference pixels.
As you move the pointer around in the main image, the white balance of the ‘If clicked’
right-hand preview image changes to reflect the white balance that would be produced
by the selected ‘neutral’ pixels, giving a ‘before’ and ‘after’ view of the white balance.
Clicking at any point will update the white balance of the main image to match that of the
‘If clicked’ display. You can press the Alt key to temporarily disable the eye-dropper tool
and ‘stick down’ the zoomed area.
Here’s a real image that illustrates how this works; you may find it easier if you try this
out for yourself.
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Zoom
Activating the zoom tool changes the display to a single rectangle showing a zoomed-in
section of the main image, where it is indicated by a green frame that you can move
around by clicking on it using the hand tool that appears when you hover the mouse over
the framed area. The size of this zoomed crop from the main image can be adjusted (in
steps of 100 %) by dragging and dropping the slider from 100% (i.e. actual size) to 400%.
The importance of this ‘actual-size’ sample facility cannot be over-emphasized; although
the preview image does give a very good idea of the final result you will get, the image
size is limited, is sub-sampled to speed up preview processing, and not all corrections
are applied. But this actual-size zoomed image is processed exactly as your final image,
and so shows you precisely the effect you’ll get. This is vital in order to be able to adjust
some of the corrections that we’re about to look at more closely below (DxO Noise), and
later in the ‘Expert Controls’ workspace description (DxO Lens Softness and USM). In this
mode, you can access the white balance eye-dropper tool by holding down the Ctrl key as
you move the pointer around, and as usual, left-clicking will adopt the current pointer
position as a new neutral white balance reference.
Crop
edit box for you to enter integer values for aspect ratio. Enabling ‘Crop’ displays a
scalable, movable rectangular box on the image to indicate the crop outline. You can
adjust the edges of this box by using the mouse (anywhere along the edge, not just on
the handles). The magnified zoom image shows the exact position of the mouse pointer,
allowing you to perform extremely accurate cropping. If you place the mouse within the
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crop area, but not near one of the edges, the mouse pointer turns into a ‘hand’ tool that
allows you to move the re-sized rectangle around as a whole.
Now let’s move on to take a look at the various correction tabs. Just before we do, though,
one general point—on all panels where a slider is accompanied by an entry box, after you
type in a correction value directly, you must press ‘Enter’ so that this value will be taken
into account. Correction settings can be performed in any order, but we have listed them
here in a sequence that offers a logical workflow; once you know how to handle each type
of correction, of course you’re free to adjust the settings in any order you like.
Color and Exposure tab
[Ctrl + F1]
This is one of the areas where new refinements and extra controls have been added in
version v3.5, to bring greater color fidelity and still more flexibility of adjustment.
Under this tab you’ll find four panels for this group of related correction controls:
White Balance
Note that when an image is selected, the White Balance panel (and its header) will change
according to whether it is a raw or other file; in the case of raw conversion, true white
balance adjustment is possible, whereas in processing other images, the white balance
adjustment is achieved slightly differently.
Raw version
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At the top of the White Balance (RAW) panel is a combo box, offering ‘Original’ (i.e. uses
the values read from the image file’s EXIF header), a series of presets for ‘standard’
lighting conditions (Daylight / Cloudy / Tungsten / Fluorescent / Flash / Shade), and a
‘Custom’ position for manual adjustment. Starting out from any one of these presets, you
can make adjustments with the color Temperature and Tint sliders—as soon as a slider is
moved, the label (Custom) appears alongside its title, to show that the setting has been
adjusted.
The ‘Custom’ position corresponds to a DxO average calibration, but it may also
represent camera settings of AWB [auto white balance] or Manual Temp [color
temperature set manually in the camera by the user]
The top slider adjusts the color ‘Temperature’—basically, it swings the balance of the red
and blue channels, whilst leaving the green untouched. Moving the slider to the right
increases the color temperature, moving it to the left decreases it. The same result can be
achieved by typing in a figure for the color temperature and pressing ‘Enter’. The range is
from 2,000 K to 20,000 K.
Note that the effect on the image is to make it warmer with increasing color temperature,
and cooler with decreasing; although this might at first appear counter-intuitive, we need
to remember that this is correcting the color balance as if the picture had been shot with
this color temperature lighting in the first place. Imagine, for example, that a picture has
been taken by tungsten artificial light, but with the camera accidentally set to ‘daylight’;
the resulting image will appear too orange. Moving the slider to the left, towards a lower
K value more appropriate for the artificial light actually used, will cool the image,
correcting the orange cast.
The lower slider adjusts the ‘Tint’—in this case, swinging the color balance between blue
and green, leaving the red untouched. Moving the slider to the left (or entering a negative
number) makes the image greener, moving it to the right or entering a positive number
makes it bluer. The range runs from +100 to –100.
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As with all the sliders in Optics Pro, clicking anywhere on the slider bar to one side or the
other of the slider itself will move the slider in that direction by a fixed increment; in the
case of the color temperature, this is in steps of 500 K, while the tint slider moves in
steps of 25.
Let’s take a look at the operation of these two controls using some actual pictures (in this
case, raw images).
Here in the middle is the picture as shot, and to the left and right, the effects of shifting
the color temperature slider left and right respectively:
And here is the same picture, this time with the tint control adjusted:
Notice how the mouse pointer turns into an eye-dropper tool when you move it over the
preview image; this powerful tool lets you pick a neutral area of the image to be taken as
a white reference. This should be a fairly light grey tone, but avoid clipped highlights, as
the results can be very unpredictable! Note that the eye-dropper ‘looks’ at the average of
a number of screen pixels, so you should also avoid transition areas that might yield
unwanted errors. Simply position the pointer over the required area, and left-click to
white balance for this point; at any time, you can re-select ‘Original’ from the pull-down
menu in order to cancel the changes and revert to the original white balance. Immediately
you click on a gray point to adjust the white balance, the legend (Custom) is automatically
added to the slider titles. The eye-dropper tool can be temporarily disabled using the Alt
key (toggles); as soon as you right-click anywhere in the image, it comes back (but
without changing the white balance, or if you left click, it comes back and changes the
white balance at the same time).
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It’s perhaps important here to explain a little about this idea of applying ‘custom’ settings to defined presets. In their quest for ever-more-faithful colorimetry, certain camera
manufacturers generate the color using different calculation matrices for each of the
defined lighting conditions represented in DxO by these presets, and as a result, DxO
itself uses different color matrices. In order to avoid any possibility of color anomalies, it
is important that images are processed using the settings appropriate for the original
taking selection. However, it is clear that users may still want to ‘tweak’ adjustments
around these preset positions, and so it is for this reason that it has been made possible
to ‘customize’ the settings under any given preset.
TIP
The way the software performs White Balance adjustment differs slightly between
processing raw and RGB images (JPEG and TIFF ). Using raw images allows greatest
freedom of white balance adjustment, but you need to exercise care when correcting
RGB files, as large amounts of correction can lead to undesirable artifacts (banding in
high-key areas / posterization in shadows).
RGB Version
If the image selected is an already-converted RGB file, a slightly different White Balance
panel is displayed. In this case, the full range of adjustments as for raw images is not
available, and there is just a single slider to adjust the overall balance of the image—
cooler to the left, warmer to the right. Extreme settings in this RGB mode need to be used
with care, in order to avoid artifacts that are the result of limitations in the RGB formats
themselves. As before, clicking on a gray point in the image with the eye-dropper tool
will adjust the overall white balance so as to make this point neutral, and the selection in
the combo box will change automatically, this time to ‘Click white/gray point’.
TIP
DxO’s powerful tone curve, lighting correction and noise reduction features mean
you’ll be able to recover an astonishing amount of shadow detail that in conventional
photography would likely have been lost (this concerns both raw and RGB images).
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Exposure compensation
If Highlight recovery is set to ‘None’, this slider works just as you might expect—moving
it to the right (or entering a positive Ev number into the edit box) increases the exposure,
to the left (or a negative Ev number) reduces it. The range is from +4.00 Ev to –4.00 Ev,
and clicking moves the slider in steps of 0.50 Ev.
During exposure adjustments, you may well find it helpful to use the highlight / shadow
clipping display, accessible using the usual Shift + Ctrl / Alt keyboard shortcuts. It’s
important to note that shadow and highlight clipping displays are computed in the final
output color space, and hence these displays, and any adjustments performed based on
them, will be affected if the output color space is subsequently changed (see the later
description of ‘Output color space’ under the ‘Output settings' tab).
Note that when processing an RGB image, highlight recovery is not available, and so the
combo box is grayed out.
However, if Highlight recovery is set to anything other than ‘None’, the manual slider is
disabled. In this case, you can select one of three strengths of automatic highlight re-
covery adjustment (Slight, Medium, Strong) in the combo box, depending on your image
requirements.
A very dark image containing a bright area (for example, a backlit shot) requires
considerable under-exposure in order to preserve highlight detail, which will make the
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overall image too dark. Automatic contrast control is not optimized for this type of
image—the output image may not necessarily have been lightened enough to bring out
the detail in the darker areas. For this reason, it is advisable to change to manual mode in
DxO Lighting in order to find a better settings compromise.
WHAT IS HIGHLIGHT RECOVERY?
Typical Digital SLR sensors have a 12-bit dynamic range—this means they use 4096 gray levels
to describe an image, while JPEG images only use 8 bits—256 gray levels. Traditionally, 12-bit
raw images are converted to 8 bits using a “tone curve” that typically reduces dynamics in the
highlights. Certain color elements may also lose highlight information. The aim of Highlight
Recovery is to overcome this problem.
DxO Optics Pro 3.5 Highlight Recovery automatically sets the Ev Bias slider to a negative value,
to bring the out-of-range highlight information within the available 8-bit dynamic range, and
then adjusts the lighting gamma to restore overall image brightness as far as is possible, always
seeking for the best balance between recovery of the highlights and preservation of the general
exposure of the scene. Note that if Gamma [on Brightness panel, DxO Lighting / Expert tab] has
been set to ‘Manual’ (i.e. ‘Auto’ box unchecked), it will have to be set manually to compensate
for the negative Ev bias when Highlight recovery is used. When it is in auto mode, the gamma is
computed taking the highlight recovery effect into account.
For some images, better results may be obtained by manually tuning Ev Bias and lighting
parameters. The simplest way is to set lighting to ‘auto’ and then tune the Ev Bias.
Expert users will first tune the Ev Bias to recover highlights and then play with lighting
parameters, and if necessary HSL lightness to find the best compromise. DxO Lighting’s local
adaptation avoids the need for tiresome masking techniques.
In some images, Highlight Recovery might induce changes in the overall brightness, contrast
and color saturation; such situations can usually be rectified using the HSL controls.
For JPEG images, a similar effect can be obtained manually, using a combination of the DxO
Lighting and Exposure compensation controls.
Original Image
With Highlight Recovery
Note how the use of ‘Highlight recovery’ produces a slight reduction in exposure and
retrieves highlight detail that had appeared to be ‘lost’; this is one of the great
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advantages of working with raw images, since with an RGB image, once highlights are
‘blown’, there is no possibility of rescuing the lost detail.
TAKING TIP
Compared to traditional film, digital capture is much less tolerant of highlight overexposure; once a highlight has reached digital clipping point, no further detail is
available. Hence it is important to familiarize yourself with the actual ‘raw’ clipping
point of your particular camera, and then adapt your taking habits to suit, holding
back the exposure if necessary to preserve highlight detail.
Tone curve
Once again, the panel has a check box to enable this correction, and if the check box is
unchecked (correction disabled), the panel will not open.
The tone curve is a very powerful tool, but is not at first all that easy to comprehend. The
graphic indicates the relationship between tonal values into the tool (across the x axis)
and out of it (up the y axis). The tone curve represents the transfer characteristic—the
way in which input tones are mapped onto output tones. The initial straight line indicates
that output tonal values are exactly the same as input values over the whole tonal range.
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In order to adjust tone mapping for correction or creative purposes, the straight line is
manipulated so as to alter that input/output relationship. In traditional photographic
terms, this means altering the gamma of the image, and this graphical approach allows a
great deal of flexibility.
Note first that the combo box at the top lets you choose to adjust either the Master
channel—i.e. all three colors together—or any of the three Red, Green, Blue channels
individually. The two buttons to the right enable you to reset respectively either the single
curve you are working on, or all three of them together, back to the default straight line.
Probably the first step in your manipulation will be to add points to the line, which you do
simply by left-clicking on it. As soon as a point is created, you can drag it around, and
the line will follow, the curve ‘splining’ as you do so—and you can watch the result live on
the preview image. You can create as many points as you need to in order to generate the
curve you want. To move a point, simply click on it; the active point is shown filled in
black, and inactive ones as hollow white. Likewise, you can delete the active point using
the Delete key.
An alternative to drawing a made-to-measure line is to make a numerical entry of the
gamma value; the box at bottom center is set by default to a gamma of 1.00, and you can
enter any figure between 0.05 and 6.00. As you would expect, a gamma value higher
than 1 tends to bring up detail out of the shadows, whilst a value lower than 1 crushes it
down into the blacks.
The input and output black and white points can likewise be set, either by dragging-&-
dropping the relevant points with your mouse, or entering numerical values in the 4 entry
boxes—from 0 (black) to 255 (white).
The Tone curve adjustment is probably the hardest to explain in words, but certainly one
of the most useful features in terms of tonal control of your images, so once again let’s
give an example using a real picture, with its associated tone curve:
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Hue / Saturation / Lightness
WHAT IS HSL?
Within equipment, digital images are described using 3 color channels Red, Green and
Blue, but this system is not very user-friendly for making meaningful adjustments.
HSL is an alternative color model, internally based on the same RGB values, but much
easier to work with.
It describes colors in terms of three fundamental parameters:
Hue — what basic color (orange, turquoise, purple, etc.)
Saturation — how strong the color is, from pastel to vibrant
Lightness — how light or dark the color is, from black to white
By making these parameters adjustable, colors can be manipulated for correction or
artistic effect.
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Another of the panels that has a check box to enable this correction, and if the check box
is unchecked (correction disabled), the panel will not open.
In ‘Expert Controls’ mode, hue, saturation and lightness can all be adjusted for the
master channel, and also separately for each of the three primary (Red, Green, Blue) and
three secondary (Yellow, Cyan, Magenta) color axes, as selected in the combo box.
As usual, the Hue slider can be moved to the right or left to change the hue, or a positive
or negative figure can be entered in the edit box; the exact operation of this slider is
naturally affected by which color channel(s) you have selected to adjust. The slider and
box values range from +180 to –180, and clicking moves the slider in steps of 10.
Likewise for Saturation, the slider can be moved to the right increase, or to the left to
decrease, the color saturation (overall, or any of the six color axes), or a positive or
negative figure can be entered. The slider and box values range from +100 to –100, and
clicking moves the slider in steps of 10.
The same goes for the Lightness slider: to the right (or enter a positive figure) to lighten,
to the left (or enter a negative figure) to darken. These slider and box values can be from
+100 to –100, and clicking moves the slider in steps of 10. The action of this slider is
slightly interesting, and you’ll probably find it easiest to understand if you look at the
result on the Histogram display. Effectively, moving the slider to the right or entering a
positive figure lifts the black level towards white, compressing the tonal range into the
upper half of the scale. Conversely, moving the slider to the left or entering a negative
number brings down the white level towards black, compressing the tonal range into the
lower half of the scale.
And also as usual, the ‘As shot’ button cancels any HSL correction.
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DxO Optics tab
[Ctrl + F2]
There can be up to six panels under this tab, though not all of these will necessarily be
enabled (i.e. displayed) for every image.
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DXO OPTICS INTRODUCTION
Lens design is always a matter of compromise. Even the most expensive lenses show a
certain amount of image degradation, referred to as aberration, such as geometric
distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration or field-dependent blur. In an attempt to
compensate for these defects, a lens is typically made of several pieces of glass assembled together in such a way as to partially cancel out each other’s defects. But this compensation is never perfect. Zoom lenses are even more complex, as the compensation
needs to work at all focal lengths.
The DxO Optics Engine is designed to improve the performance of a lens by compensating through software the residual defects of the lens itself. For example, pin-cushion or
barrel distortion (as well as more complex distortions) can be corrected by applying an
inverse geometric transform to the digital image. The DxO Optics Engine works on the
principle of creating a detailed model of lens performance by taking thousands of images
with each lens for which a DxO Lens Module is created. This model – the DxO Lens
Module – is then used by the DxO Optics Engine algorithms to “reverse out” all the
defects. This way of working means the optical corrections are based on the “real-world”
defects of the lens, rather than on estimates, and can be fully automated. The current
DxO Optics Engine correction is fairly exhaustive: chromatic, geometric, axial and field-
dependent aberrations can all be corrected simultaneously, and if desired, automatically.
Correction is automatically adapted within the field and from one picture to another in
accordance with taking conditions (focal length, aperture, etc.)
Focusing distance
Certain lens correction modules (distortion, lateral chromatic aberration) need focusing
distance information in order to perform optical corrections. Some cameras do not store
the focusing distance in the EXIF data; if this is the case, the focusing distance panel will
be displayed, and you should manually enter the focusing distance used for the shot, as
accurately as you are able to. A combo box allows you to select either the default ‘not set’
(in this case, distortion and lateral chromatic aberration will not be corrected), or various
distance
ranges, whilst the slider lets you set the distance precisely, or alternatively,
enter the figures in the edit box to the right. Do note that the slider may allow you to
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enter a focusing distance that is not actually covered by your lens; in this case, DxO will
use the minimum focusing distance applicable for your lens.
Note that the units for focusing distance (feet & inches or meters) can be changed in the
‘Miscellaneous’ tab under the ‘Preferences’ menu, accessible via the Workspace pulldown or using the Ctrl+P shortcut.
Since focusing distance has the most visible effect on distortion correction, you will
probably find it helpful to enable distortion correction preview (see below) when adjusting
focusing distance.
Focal length
Likewise, in order to optimize optical corrections, a small number of zoom lens correction
modules need more precise focal length information over certain specific parts of their
range than is available from the camera’s EXIF file; if this is the case, the focal length
panel will be displayed, and you should manually enter the focal length the lens was set
at for the shot, as accurately as you are able to. The slider lets you set the distance
precisely, and will be calibrated for the range of focal lengths across which ambiguity
exists for the particular lens in question; click steps in this instance are 50% of the scale
(so too broad to be of much practical value). Alternatively, you can enter the figures in the
edit box to the right.
Camera orientation
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Although we recommend you always use DxO Optics Pro to rotate your image
automatically using the information from the EXIF orientation tag, you may have images
that have been already rotated. In this case, and in this case only, the Camera orientation
panel appears; it will never appear if DxO Optics Pro rotates your images automatically.
It allows you to specify in which orientation the shot was taken. You have three options.
The first is to indicate which way the camera was turned when the image was taken (to
the left or to the right). The second option is to select “I don't know. Do your best.”, in
which case DxO Optics Pro will apply a default. In the extremely unlikely event of the
results proving unacceptable, as a last resort you can click the third “Don’t correct
distortion and lateral chromatic aberration” button.
WHY DOES CAMERA ORIENTATION MATTER?
To correct images properly, DxO Optics Pro needs to know the orientation of the
camera with respect to the image taken, because a large number of lenses are not
symmetrical—the optical elements themselves are usually symmetrical, but the lens
mount itself is not. Depending on the camera, the optical center may not always
correspond to the image center. This has little impact on the correction of softness and
vignetting, but may have a significant impact on the correction of distortion and lateral
chromatic aberration—the variation in measured distortion between two symmetricallypositioned points in the image can be as much as 0.25%. We strive to achieve a residual
distortion of just 0.15%.
If images have been rotated using an external program, the indication of the original
orientation is not always preserved. When a photo is shot, the EXIF Orientation tag is
set by the camera, but the image is saved horizontally. Most image downloaders will
read this tag, rotate the image accordingly and erase the tag to prevent other software
from rotating the image again. This is all very well, but the end result is an image for
which the original orientation is not known.
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Because the effects of orientation are most visible on the correction of distortion,
previewing distortion correction may help you decide in which orientation you shot the
pictures.
Distortion
Again here, there is a check box to enable this correction, and if the check box is
unchecked (correction disabled), the panel will not open. The Distortion panel has just
one slider for the degree of distortion correction; the range is 0 to 100 %, with a step size
of 10 % when clicked. The default setting is 100 %, and you should only depart from this
in special circumstances—either to avoid cropping of important detail near edges, or for
creative reasons.
TIP
Distortion correction involves a non-linear change in the magnification, which produces
curved edges to the image and empty black spaces. To restore clean, straight edges
and maintain the image’s original aspect ratio, some cropping of the image is
inevitable; at very wide-angle (and especially with fish-eyes) this may be quite
significant, so remember to make allowance for this when framing such shots.
In order to maximize the amount of image usable, version 3.5 includes the new ‘Max
Image’ feature; if this box is checked, the image aspect ratio is no longer constrained to
the original proportions as shot, but is allowed to expand outwards to the largest
possible centered rectangle that will fit within the corrected image. In certain cases, this
can result in as much as 40 % extra usable image area!
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TAKING TIP
This new feature is going to be of especial interest to users of super-wide / fisheye
lenses, and opens new possibilities for taking panoramic shots—now you can use a
very wide-angle lens, use DxO Optics Pro to correct the inevitable distortion it will
produce, and then make the most of ‘Max frame’ to allow you to crop your image down
to the final wanted proportions. Now you can take panoramic shots in situations where
you couldn’t have before, or at least, not without a great deal more time and effort.
Chromatic aberration
Version 3.5 handles chromatic aberration correction in a completely different way from
earlier versions, and as a result, there’s a whole new ‘Chromatic aberration’ panel under
the DxO Optics tab. It carries check boxes for ‘Lateral chromatic aberration’ and ‘Purple
fringing’, and you should normally check these in order for both corrections to be applied
unless, exceptionally, you observe specific problems. There is a slider / edit box for
correction strength (enabled only when the ‘Auto’ box is unchecked), with a range from 0
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to 200 % and click steps of 20 %, and another for fringe size, running from 0 to 12 with
click steps of 2. Normally, you should leave these set to ‘Auto’, unless you observe any
artifacts as a result of the system’s being confused between (wanted) fine color detail and
unwanted chromatic aberration; in this case, adjusting the fringe size and/or correction
strength should cure the problem.
It’s worth noting that lateral chromatic aberration correction is still based around the DxO
Lens Module, and so is specific to a given lens/body combination, whereas overall
chromatic aberration and ‘purple fringing’ correction is based on a completely different
algorithm that is not hardware-specific. As a result, overall and purple fringing will
always be possible, whereas lateral chromatic aberration correction will only be offered
where the appropriate DxO Lens Module is available (if not, the check box won’t be
displayed). ‘Purple fringing’ correction is an extension of overall chromatic aberration
correction, tailored in such a way as to particularly address fringing in the red/blue
channels with respect to the green channel.
It’s also important to be aware that there is a certain interaction between distortion and
lateral chromatic aberration corrections as far as the preview image is concerned; in
effect, lateral chromatic aberration correction can produce a very small zoom effect, and
corresponding mild cropping of the final image; this is normally completely swamped by
the more significant cropping that may be produced by distortion correction. However, in
the event that you have chosen to preview chromatic aberration but not distortion, this
could have led to an error in the preview image. For this reason, even if distortion is not
selected for preview, the correction is still applied, but at 0 % strength (thus processing
time is minimized), to ensure that the preview image is always accurate. This is an
entirely user-transparent process that you simply ought to be aware of.
Vignetting
Again here, there is a check box to enable this correction, and if the check box is
unchecked (correction disabled), the panel will not open.
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Vignetting correction takes place in two steps, both of which can be fine-tuned.
First, from the lens data, focal length and aperture setting, the DxO Correction Module
computes the attenuation factor for every pixel in the image, and each pixel’s RGB value
is multiplied by the inverse of this factor. The correction strength slider (range 0–100 %,
click step size 10 %) allows you to decide how much of the vignetting should be removed
from the whole image, independent of image content—in other words, all pixels will be
multiplied by the scaled factor applicable to their position in the image field.
Second, a filter is applied to avoid clipping in bright areas and noise increase in dark
areas. This is done by limiting the value by which a pixel can be multiplied, depending on
its luminance. The effect of this filter will be different, depending on image content. The
Shadow/highlight preservation slider lets you fine-tune this second step; the range is Off
– 100%, with a step size of 10 % when clicked. As usual, the normally-checked ‘Auto’ box
must be unchecked in order to enable the manual control. If you want full correction of
vignetting, you can set the value to 0 (Off).
Shadow/highlight preservation restricts the amount of exposure correction applied by the
vignetting corrector at both ends of the tonal range, so as to avoid either crushing in the
shadows, or clipping in the highlights. So, for example, if you want to limit the luminance
increase (which may reveal unwanted noise) in rather dark image corners because you
shot at high ISO, shadow preservation limits the degree of correction being applied.
Likewise, because of the vignetting, the camera may have incorrectly exposed a cloud in
the sky; the highlight preservation filter allows you apply as much vignetting correction
as possible, while still retaining wanted highlight detail.
We recommend you do not depart from the default 100 %, as the shadow/highlight
preservation slider is often more effective than the correction strength slider in
preventing the undesirable effects of vignetting correction.
Note that only vignetting caused by the lens or sensor are corrected. Mechanical
vignetting, caused for example by too narrow a lens shade, cannot be corrected.
DxO Lighting tab
[Ctrl + F3]
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DXO LIGHTING INTRODUCTION
This key DxO Optics Pro feature merits a little explanation.
Natural scenes rarely exhibit ideal lighting conditions; light sources are often
directional and sometimes quite harsh. What’s more, when taking pictures we are
often more concerned about capturing the right moment, and pay little attention to
potential lighting problems. To compound the problem, the dynamic range of sensors
can’t compete with that of our eyes. All this can result in some shots exhibiting
under-exposed, dark or shadowed regions with missing details.
To overcome these problems, DxO Labs introduced DxO Lighting, a unique local
exposure and dynamic range optimizer. Automatically replicating analog film
techniques known as “dodging and burning”, DxO Lighting Engine brings out shadow
detail of digital image files while preserving highlights, textures, colors and a natural
look.
How does this work?
To a certain degree—basically when the desired image signal is sufficiently above the
noise level—lighting problems can be corrected afterwards, given appropriate image
processing.
Simply put, DxO Lighting first breaks the image down into a number of areas in which
luminance values have a certain range; it then processes each of these areas in the
most appropriate manner to reveal detail. In general terms, lightness and tone curve
slope are slightly increased in dark areas to bring out detail, yet avoid the highlight
clipping that could occur if the overall gamma were adjusted.
Pixel-precise image segmentation technology lies at the heart of DxO Lighting, to
deliver automatic local contrast adjustment and thereby reveal hidden detail in dark
areas. The local nature of the adjustment is of course crucial to reveal shadow detail
without burning out the highlights.
Once again here, there is a check box to enable this correction, and if the check box is
unchecked (correction disabled), the panel will not open. In ‘Expert Controls’ mode, the
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lighting tab has two secondary tabs, ‘Auto’ and ‘Expert’. The ‘Auto’ tab has a check box
for Auto with a combo box offering a choice of Slight, Medium or Strong correction. The
manual ‘Correction strength’ slider is disabled until the Auto box is unchecked. Slider
range is from 0 to 150 %, clicking moves it in 10 % steps. There is also an edit box for
direct entry of the correction value.
Look at the effect on the picture below, and compare the histograms:
The ‘Expert’ tab keeps the same basic check box and combo boxes for Auto with its three
options for the degree of correction (Slight / Medium / Strong); note that this applies to
all of the settings set to ‘auto’ under this tab. As before, the manual ‘Correction strength’
slider is disabled until the Auto box is unchecked. Slider range is from 0 to 150 %,
clicking moves it in 10 % steps. There is also an edit box for direct entry.
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But in addition, a whole new group of controls is now available. First come the buttons for
All auto / All manual that check / uncheck all of the ‘Auto’ boxes at the same time, and a
central ‘As shot’ button that resets all sliders to their default positions—very useful!
The White and Black point sliders operate in a complementary fashion; each has a range
from 0 to 255, with click steps of 10, or you can enter a whole number in the edit boxes
instead. These controls have the effect of stretching the image’s lower tonal range up
towards white, or vice-versa: stretching the upper range down towards black. This is
similar in many ways to what might be achieved using a tone curve adjustment, and is
probably easiest to visualize in conjunction with the Histogram display. Selecting or
deselecting ‘Auto’ for either automatically selects / deselects it for the other too.
The purpose of these controls is to enable you to adjust an image so as to occupy as
much as possible of the dynamic range (= available tonal range). Normally, you should
limit adjustment in such a way that no more than one of the three Red / Green / Blue
channels reaches saturation (white and/or black). You’re sure to find the histogram
display invaluable here!
The Brightness panel has an overall gamma control, the slider and entry box having a
default setting of 1.00, with a range from 0.50 to 5.00, and click steps of 0.10. The effect
of increasing the gamma is to ‘stretch’ (increase the contrast of) the darker end of the
tonal range and ‘squash’ (reduce the contrast of) the brighter end.
The ‘Preserve shadows’ feature (checked by default) operates at higher positive gamma
settings, where shadows tend to become washed-out, and determines to what extent the
slope of the tone curve (= contrast increase) should be restricted towards the darker end
of the scale, with the effect of ‘holding back’ shadows. The Radius slider / edit box
modifies the way DxO Lighting decides what size areas represent shadow or not, and
hence how the gamma setting is applied locally in the image; it has a range from 0
(entirely global) to 15 (fully localized). The precise use of these manual controls is highly
dependent on the exact nature and content of each individual image—and of course, on
the artistic effect you wish to achieve!
And last but by no means least comes the pair of sliders / edit boxes for Local contrast
(range from 0 to 100 %, and a click step of 10 %) and Global contrast (range from +50 to
–50 %, and a click step of 10 %). As you might expect, the Global contrast control uses an
S-curve to affect the overall contrast of the image, with a useful bi-directional range
allowing both contrast enhancement for slightly flat images, and reduction for contrasty
ones. At the ‘Less’ end of the scale (–ve setting values), the dynamic range is increased at
both the darker and lighter ends of the tonal range, and midtones are flattened.
Conversely, ‘More’ (+ve setting values) has the effect of stretching the dynamic range of
midtones, while slightly flattening it at the darker and lighter ends.
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The Local contrast control, on the other hand, is more subtle in its effect, altering the
contrast in a spatially-determined way, having something of the feel of dodging-andburning. You might find it helpful to regard it as applying a varying tone curve across the
image, according to its interpretation of whether a given area represents shadow or not,
yet always taking care to avoid letting highlights burn out. Look at the examples below to
help you get a feel for the way this very powerful tool can enhance your pictures.
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DxO Noise tab
[Ctrl + F4]
Remember that these corrections will not be visible in the main preview image, but only
by using the Zoom function.
DXO NOISE INTRODUCTION
This is a feature of DxO Optics Pro that merits a little explanation.
DxO Noise is a hardware-model based correction—in other words, the correction
algorithm is specifically tailored by DxO Labs for each camera, and so this correction
will only be performed for images from cameras that have been calibrated by DxO.
More and more cameras are being profiled as time goes by. Generally, DxO Noise
achieves a 2-stop gain in image noise level. So for example, an image shot at 1600
ISO and processed by DxO Noise, will display the noise level of an image shot at 400
ISO. DxO Noise has been specifically designed to retain maximum detail in the
image.
Once again here, there is a check box to enable this correction, and if the check box is
unchecked (correction disabled), the panel will not open. All four controls under this tab
have ‘Auto’ boxes that have to be unchecked in order to access the manual controls; as
before, there are All auto / All manual buttons at the bottom that can be used to check /
uncheck all the controls at the same time.
In order to judge the effect of your noise adjustments, it is essential to use the Zoom tool,
which gives an accurate preview of final image quality. To make your adjustments, pick
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an area of your image where you can best assess the noise, and then if necessary move
the zoom area around in order to examine other critical areas.
The degree of Luminance noise correction can be set using the slider / edit box, with a
range from 0 to 100 %, with 10 % click steps.
DxO’s very intelligent noise reduction algorithm operates virtually undetectably on almost
all picture content, but since some softening of certain image areas might sometimes be
apparent, it obviously makes sense to use as low a level of noise reduction as can be
tolerated, given the parameters of the image in question. Version 3.5 offers a real
improvement in this respect, with refined algorithms to enable as much fine detail as
possible to be preserved, while keeping noise at a very low level.
‘Expert Controls’ mode gives access to four further controls; the first is new in DxO
Optics Pro version 3.5: a ‘Fine detail preservation’ slider / edit box with a range from 0 to
100 %, with 10 % click steps. Increasing this setting will leave a greater amount of
specifically fine detail in the image (at the expense of leaving a small amount of residual
noise, but of the high-frequency kind, which is the least objectionable); this is really
useful in order to avoid the rather ‘plastic’ look than can occur at higher levels of noise
reduction.
The degree of Chrominance noise correction can be set using the slider / edit box, with a
range from 0 to 100 %, with 10 % click steps. This is useful for reducing or eliminating
colored noise—to which the eye is particularly sensitive—and you can usually safely use
quite high settings with little risk of unwanted side-effects.
Impulse noise is randomly-occurring noise with random amplitude that is not predictable.
Impulse noise correction can be applied using the slider / edit box, again with a range
from 0 to 100 % and click steps of 10 %. It offers very effective reduction of this type of
noise, but should be used judiciously, because of the slightly greater risk of its having a
visible effect on wanted picture detail. Note that when processing Raw images this control
is not available (its Auto check box and entry box will be grayed out), as this correction is
applied automatically as part of the Raw conversion process.
And lastly for this tab, the Gray equalizer slider / box has a range from 0 to 100 %, with
10 % click steps. This makes it possible to ‘clean up’ unwanted colored noise from
midtones, and has the effect of slightly desaturating neutral tones around mid-gray, to
minimize spurious color effects in these sensitive areas. You’ll probably be able to leave
it at the default setting, unless you notice the effect it can have of desaturating certain
pastel tones.
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Look at the zoomed-in sections of picture below, which illustrate the effect of this
noise reduction, particularly visible in the shadow areas.
Without
correction
After
correction
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Sharpening tab
[Ctrl + F5]
NOTE FOR USERS OF EARLIER VERSIONS
Functionally, Sharpening has not changed as far as the user interface is concerned;
however, some major refinements have been introduced at the level of the algorithms
used, and the interactions between the sharpening correction and noise reduction. In
particular, steps have been taken to improve the ability to distinguish between
wanted fine detail and unwanted noise, and a new control to preserve fine detail is
available under the DxO Noise correction tab (please refer to the description of that
tab for more details).
DxO can correct only for certain kinds of softness—the lens + camera combination’s
inherent inability to reproduce fine detail (commonly referred to as “optical blur”).
Other kinds of softness—caused by inaccurate focusing, insufficient depth of field
or motion blur, for example—cannot be corrected.
Remember that these corrections will not be visible in the main preview image, but
only by using the Zoom function.
DxO Lens Softness
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This forms part of Optics Pro’s optical corrections, and as such, is lens- / bodydependent. As a result, this panel will only be enabled (i.e. displayed) for images for
which the appropriate correction module is installed. Here again, there is a check
box to enable this correction, and if the check box is unchecked (correction disabled), the panel will not open.
The DxO Lens Softness slider allows you to manually set the overall level of
sharpness required for a particular usage.
The sharpness level you choose to apply will of course depend on questions like
personal taste, final resolution and type of output (print, web, etc).
The slider / edit box range is in arbitrary units from –2.0 to +2.0, from Softer to
Sharper; click steps are 1.0, with a default setting of 0. Moving the slider to the left
or entering negative values will give a softer, smoother image, while moving it to the
right or entering positive values will give a sharper image.
The value –1 is the equivalent of “Gaussian Blur” in Adobe Photoshop®. The value +1
is not a simple unsharp mask. The sharpening applied in DxO Optics Pro is
intelligent, in that it depends on the image content. Areas with noise are sharpened
less than areas containing detail. For each area in the image, the amount of
sharpening will also depend, for example, on the ISO—less sharpening is
automatically applied at high ISO than low ISO, to avoid increasing the noise in the
image.
Note that because this sharpness correction is specifically tailored for your camera’s
optics, and may well vary across the image field (to allow for lens performance
shortcomings), it is usually preferable to perform as much of your sharpening as
possible using this Lens Softness correction, allowing lighter use of the Unsharp
Mask (USM), which although a sophisticated and adaptive tool, is a nonetheless a
more generalized process. Of course, for images where the appropriate DxO
Correction Module is not installed, all sharpening has to be done in the USM.
Version 3.5’s sharpening has been refined in order to preserve as much fine detail
as possible, and avoid unwanted interactions with the noise reduction. The result is
more natural-looking pictures, avoiding the ‘plastic’ look so often associated with
images that have undergone both sharpening and noise-reduction.
Unsharp Mask
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Once again here, there is a check box to enable this correction, and if the check box
is unchecked (correction disabled), the panel will not open. The Amount slider / edit
box obviously sets the degree of sharpening correction applied, with a range from 0
to 500 %, and a click step of 10 %. The Radius slider / edit box has a range in
arbitrary units from 0.1 to 5.0, with a click step of 1.0. This control affects the
fineness of the correction zone surrounding image detail; low values give very
subtle correction, whilst over-use of high values can lead to the formation of haloes.
The Threshold slider / edit box has a range from 0 to 255, with click steps of 10,
and adjusts how far up the tonal range sharpness correction commences. To avoid
noise increase in lowlights, which may not contain much wanted detail, the
threshold can be raised so that sharpness correction starts at a higher gray level.
Take a look at these images to see the effect of these controls:
Without USM
With USM
Im age inform ation tab
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[Ctrl + F8]
EXIF
Summarizes the EXIF data for the current image. Note that where a number of
images are selected together, any ambiguity in any or all of the EXIF information
between them will result in a display of ???? in its place.
EXIF Editor tab
The Expert Controls mode Image information palette also carries an EXIF editor tab,
which enables you enter Artist and Copyright data for the currently-selected
image(s).
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Output settings tab
[Ctrl + F9]
Output color space
The combo box permits selection of:
As shot
Custom
sRGB
Adobe RGB
When you click on ‘Custom’, and as long as there’s at least one ICC profile available,
an open file button gives access to a browser, allowing you to open a saved custom
color space. Note the DxO supports only ICC profiles with an .ICC or .ICM extension.
Note that DxO supports only RGB color profiles, and not CMYK ones.
If the color profile chosen is not valid, an error message will be displayed.
Note that both Preview and the DxO Viewer always display images in the sRGB color
space, but the actual output color space selected will be reflected in the computation of the corrected image; if necessary, this can be verified by close examination
of the Histogram display.
In the Raw domain, the color profile will only be applied to the image at the point it
is converted from Raw to RGB. Color profile is not applied to raw images processed
and saved in DNG format.
In JPEG, the profile will only be applied if it is different from the input profile. In any
event, the final image will be tagged with the chosen profile.
‘As shot’ applies the color profile embedded in the original image.
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It’s important to note that shadow and highlight clipping displays are computed in
the final output color space, and hence these displays, and any adjustments performed based on them, will be affected if the output color space is subsequently
changed.
Output file format
Here’s one of DxO Optics Pro’s really useful time-saving features—not only can you
save in Adobe’s .DNG file format, but you can do so at the same time as saving in
JPEG and TIFF too, if you want. This means that you can batch-process a whole load
of images all in one go, and simultaneously save copies in multiple formats, perhaps
for speedy previewing plus further editing. Do note that .DNG is only available as an
output format for raw input images. This raw in–raw out facility means you can still
use your favorite third-party raw converter if you wish, once your images have been
corrected in Optics Pro.
Each of the three tabs for DNG, JPEG and TIFF formats starts off with the same basic
functions. Check the ‘Output in this format’ box under each tab to save your output
files in that format.
All three tabs have an ‘Enable crop’ check box, to support the new ‘Crop’ feature in
version 3.5—for full details of this feature, please see the preview toolbar
description. Note that the ‘Enable crop’ check box on the preview toolbar sets this
check box, but it can also be set / unset here from the Output format tabs—all three
tabs share the same crop enable / disable, so changing the setting on any one tab
changes the others too.
In the case of the JPEG and TIFF output format tabs, the size information is updated
to reflect the re-sized image resulting from cropping. When using the new ‘Crop’
feature, the last-used crop size is initially applied, so the size information may not
be up to date until the new cropped image has been re-calculated for preview. In
the case of the ‘Max image’ feature, the re-sized image is only calculated after
correction, so image size data will not be displayed, and size settings are not
accessible until an image’s corrections have been calculated for preview—and not at
all in ‘thumbnail only’ view.
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For JPEG input images, two output file formats are available: TIFF (compressed or
un-compressed) or JPEG (with a compression ratio variable from 0–100).
For Raw input images, three output file formats are available: TIFF (8-bit,
compressed or un-compressed, or 16-bit), JPEG (with a compression ratio variable
from 0–100) and Adobe® Digital Negative (DNG).
Saving in DNG, allows you to use the unique features of DxO Optics Pro (DxO
demosaicing, DxO Optics corrections, etc.) while still maintaining a workflow
involving Adobe® Camera Raw or any other DNG-input compliant Raw converter.
You may choose the suffix to be automatically added to filenames of corrected files.
You can either keep the one suggested (“ _DXO”) or create your own, being sure to
use only non-accented characters, figures, and the _, = or . signs. For RAW input
images, an additional suffix “_raw” is automatically added, in order to allow
RAW+JPEG processing. You are not allowed to leave the suffix blank—this is to avoid
deletion of original files by accident.
A check box allows you to overwrite or not existing processed images. If you choose
not to overwrite, and then try to process a previously-corrected image for which the
processed file still exists in the same output directory, upon starting processing, an
error message is returned, and the image will not be processed
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Likewise, if you click the radio button ‘in this directory’, the grayed-out ‘Browse’
button to the right is enabled, and will open a browser window where you can set an
alternative path for saving your corrected images—as mentioned briefly earlier, this
is essential if you’re importing images via a non-recordable medium, since in that
case it is not possible to save output files to the same location as the input files,
which will cause Optics Pro to return an error when you try to process.
In addition, the JPEG and TIFF format tabs invite you to set parameters that are
relevant to those formats. In the case of JPEG, that means the quality slider; the
factory default is 100, on a scale from 0 (maximum compression, so lowest quality,
but smallest file size) to 100 (minimum compression, so best quality, but larger file
size). Clicking moves the slider in steps of 10. For best quality, always use the
highest setting you can, as appropriate for your file size requirements—if in doubt,
leave the factory default setting. Be wary of using JPEG compression ratios lower
than 70, which create highly visible artifacts. We suggest you try out several
compression ratios and choose the one that best suits your requirements.
The TIFF tab offers check boxes for Compress and 8-bit conversion; only check
these if you fully understand their function and relevance to your specific needs,
otherwise leave them unchecked (factory default setting).
In addition, in both JPEG and TIFF formats, the ‘Expert Controls’ mode allows the
option of resizing the image, and re-sampling to a different resolution. Combo
boxes for both size and resolution include the option of ‘Keep original’, as well as
various preset resolutions. The size combo box offers a choice of units for
expressing the size: pixels, %, cm or inches; the units of the given size, together
with a box to enter the new dimension, will change accordingly, and the picture size
and resolution information is summarized below. Depending on your future
requirements (enlargement, reproduction, etc.), you may well be able to use a
smaller size and/or resolution, which will of course help to minimize file size. Do
note however that reducing the image size increases the amount of processing
required, and hence there is a processing time penalty.
That completes our tour of the Expert Controls palette, so now you are ready to
adjust the settings for your images, and then push the Start button (or use the Ctrl
+ S keyboard shortcut, or select the ‘Start batch’ command from the Workflow
menu).
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Processing
That completes our tour of the Key Controls palette, so now you are ready to adjust
the settings for your images, and then push the Start button (or use the Ctrl + S
keyboard shortcut, or select the Start batch command from the Workflow menu).
Version 3.5 includes a multi-processing feature that can help speed up batch
processing, if your computer is equipped with multiple (logical) processors. The
configuration options for this new feature can be found under ‘Preferences’ (Workspace menu, or Ctrl + P). Here are a few general details about processing:
–
images; at the end of these checks, it may be necessary for the user to respond
to one or more questions before processing proper can commence; for example,
if there are images for which the focusing distance has not been set, a dialog
box pops up, asking whether you want to continue without correcting distortion
and chromatic aberration, or cancel the batch to go back and set the focusing
distance for these images.
– To improve processing efficiency in the event of multiprocessing, images are
always sorted before processing, so they will not necessarily be processed in
thumbnail order
–
being applied, processing may take from just a few seconds to several minutes,
or even longer in the case of slower computers.
–
If the disk cache has been enabled, raw images will be calculated immediately
batch processing finishes, so that converted ‘Before’ images will already be
available when Viewer is launched. Without the disk cache, ‘Before’ images
cannot be calculated in advance, which slows down Viewer launch where large
images are involved. This saves a lot of time at the review stage.
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–
progress. It has a progress bar showing progress of the batch as a whole. The
lower part of the window shows details of the image currently being processed,
and its individual progress. The ‘Skip’ button allows you to skip a particular
image, while the ‘Pause’ button lets you pause one or more processes (if multiprocessing is enabled)—this allows you to temporarily free up CPU time if you
need to run another application, for example. In this case, the images awaiting
processing are simply shared out between the other processes still running.
–
Where multi-processing is being used, the lower part of the screen shows
progress information for each process running; up to 4 will be displayed at
once—if more are being used, a vertical scroll bar will allow you to view the
others.
–
Once processing is finished, a log screen (common to all the workspaces) is
displayed which will report any problems that might have been encountered, and
offers ‘View’ and ‘Done’ buttons.
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–
When Raw images have been processed and saved only in DNG format, they
cannot be displayed in DxO Viewer, and so in this case the ‘View’ button will be
grayed out.
–
through all your images and compare the corrected versions with the originals.
Let’s take a look at that now…
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D xO View er w indow anatom y
Mac Version
A toolbar…
information
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Windows Version
a toolbar…
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Just like the main DxO Optics Pro screen, the Viewer’s Image menu offers
commands for * Rotate 90° counterclockwise (left) / clockwise (right) [Ctrl + L or R],
along with a new command, * Delete corrected files, which enables you to delete the
corrected file for the current image—for example, if after viewing you decide that
you’d like to process an image again.
The Viewer’s View menu offers commands for * Next / Previous image [also
available as keyboard shortcuts Æ or Ç and Å or È], as well as switching between
* Before / After DxO images [Ctrl + D / Ctrl + F], and also for * Zoom in / out [Ctrl
+ + or -], * Fit to window [Ctrl + I], and * Actual size [Ctrl + 1] .
All these same Image and View menu functions are also available via the Toolbar
buttons:
Fit to window, and
Actual size. Note that any zoom setting you use will be
applied to both original and corrected images.
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A pair of
After DxO / Before buttons enable you to toggle back and forth be-
tween the original (unprocessed) and corrected versions of your images — also
available simply by right-clicking anywhere in the workspace to toggle between the
two [Keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl + D / Ctrl + F].
allows you to delete selected results files—you
might need to do this, for example, for certain images that you wish to correct again,
or in cases where you have more than one output file format and want to eliminate
one or more of them.
The
workspace.
The bottom status bar displays the filename currently being viewed in the center,
and if you hover the mouse over it, a tooltip displays information about the corrections that have been applied.
A legend in the bottom left-hand corner confirms whether you’re viewing the
original or corrected image, and indicates if only partial correction has been applied.
In some cases, it may not have been possible to apply all the corrections requested
to an image, and those that have been applied will be indicated here.
Note that if you have resized images as part of your processing, such images will
show a difference in size between the original / corrected images in the Viewer.
Normally, before / after images will appear with their centers aligned, and so will
overlay correctly (unless you have resized them). However, in the specific case where
an image corrected using the ‘Max frame’ feature yields a corrected image that
extends outside the original image boundaries (even after any cropping), the
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before / after images will be displayed with their centers re-aligned, which may
mean that the overlay is displaced.
After viewing a newly-processed batch of images, when you return to your main
DxO Optics Pro workspace, the thumbnails for that batch will be updated.
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CREDITS AND PERMISSIONS
- Portions of this software are based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group.
- TIFF support based on LibTIFF, Copyright © 1988-1997 Sam Leffler, Copyright © 19911997 Silicon Graphics, Inc.
- This product includes DNG technology under license by Adobe Systems Incorporated.
More information may be found at: http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/main.html
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Transcription

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