DxO Optics Pro 7

DxO is better known for its embedded camera software and image-testing software, but the French company is increasingly sharing its expertise and strong academic ties with digital photographers. The results are little short of amazing, letting you get the most accurate and therefore lifelike images possible from your digital camera. Optics Pro 7 differs from most imaging software, such as Adobe Photoshop ($699, 5 stars) and its little brother, Photoshop Elements ($99.99, 4 stars), which offer lot of doodads to gussy up your photos. It also differs from professional workflow apps like Lightroom ($299, 4.5 stars) which offers an abundance of importing and organizing features. Instead DxO's $99 Optic Pro 7 can be thought of as a dedicated digital photo correction tool. It will be of interest not only to photography professionals, but also to enthusiast who want to get the most accurate images from their digital SLRs or high-end point-and-shoots.

DxO Optics Pro 7 does most of its work with simple-to-use automatic presets. Optics Pro 7's default is to use "modules" developed specifically for your camera body and lens combination.? To jump the gun on my evaluation a bit, my results were remarkable, particularly with raw camera files?the program can benefit JPG shots as well, but results on raw camera files are far more impressive. Optics Pro brought out submerged detail and eliminated obvious image noise and chromatic aberration better than Lightroom's similar equipment-specific correction. Lightroom's profile presets only correct geometric distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting. DxO adds noise reduction, color correction, and sharpening to Lightroom's, and DxO actually does a much better job at eliminating chromatic abberation.

Of course, these corrections depend on DxO having the data for your camera and lens in its database. Most popular DSLRs are represented, such as those made by Canon, Nikon, Pentax, and Sony, as well as some point-and-shoot models from the likes of FujiFilm, Panasonic, and Samsung. But if you have a lesser-known or not-really-enthiusast-level point-and-shoot, you're probably better off keeping your $99. The company expects to offer profiles for over 5,000 camera+lens combinations by the end of 2011, and 10,000 in 2012.

Unlike Adobe Lightroom, Optics Pro offers no workflow and few image-collection organization tools: There's no import feature at all?you simply choose a folder from the directory tree in the inaptly named Organize tab, the first one you start working in. Other software like Lightroom and Apple Aperture lets you apply adjustments and tagging during import. As soon as you open an image, Optics Pro applies its best-guess corrections, and if you do nothing more than accept this, your photos will be much improved from the default. I tested using raw image files from a Canon EOS T1i, a 7D, and a Sony a580.

Setup and Interface
DxO Optics Pro 7 comes in both Windows and Mac OS X flavors, and a free trial edition gives you access to its full feature set for 31 days. The 200MB installer creates only a 32-bit app on your system. That's one complaint I have with Optics Pro 7: for working with the huge photo files you get from high-end DSLRs these days, 64-bit would seem desirable. I tested on a quad-core 3.4GHz AMD Windows 7 64-bit system with 4GB RAM.

DxO Optics Pro 7's interface is clear, and mostly self-explanatory, with three tabs for its three modes?Organize (an overstatement), Customize, and Process. The first time you use any of these, an explanatory message box appears as part of the program's "first step wizard." Though it does let you rate images with 1 to 5 stars, DxO Optics Pro doesn't offer tons of organizational tools, the way Adobe Photoshop Elements or Lightroom do?forget things like face recognition, color coding, and extensive tagging.

During your first trips through the app, switching to any of the three modes pops up an explanation box, but you can disable these as you get more comfortable with the interface. As you'd expect, the image takes up the lion's share of the program window in the center, and below this a filmstrip-like image browser tray shows images available in the selected folder. Your mouse wheel zooms the main image view in and out. You can also fit the image to the window, set it to actual pixel size, or use a slider or percentage dropdown to zoom.

Cursor choices include a pointer, hand tool, and magnifier. Clicking the pointer over your image shows you the original, un-optimized image. You may be amazed by how much noise and other distortion appears when you click back to original. A double-image button lets you view the original and corrected images side-by-side, and the final toolbar item lets you choose a preset to apply.

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