I know Lightroom very, very well. I’ve been writing about it for years. A large part of this site’s content is devoted to Adobe Lightroom tips and tutorials. That means, though, that I also know its weaknesses, and there are plenty. So I thought I’d run through the editing steps I used on this photo and why I did them in DxO PhotoLab and not Lightroom.
Here’s my start shot. It was late in the afternoon, very damp and getting dark, but I thought this was an interesting composition. The unprocessed RAW file looks flat, but I was pretty sure there was some more interest in the sky than was immediately visible and that the colors and textures of the stone sea wall had some potential.
So why not use Lightroom for this?
1. Image quality
This was shot on an Olympus Pen-F, a Micro Four Thirds camera, and Lightroom is not very kind to MFT sensors, or small sensors in general. This is an issue with the Adobe Camera Raw processing engine. It produces quite a coarse noise pattern that’s especially apparent with smaller-sensor cameras. In fact I wonder how much of the criticism of Micro Four Thirds sensors stems from this alone – people opening up the RAW files in Adobe Camera Raw/Lightroom and thinking they don’t look very good. No, they don’t, but it’s not the camera.
In fact if you open OM System .ORF files in Capture One or here, in DxO PhotoLab, they look ten times better. The detail is sharper, the noise is lower. It makes you realize they are actually very good cameras. You can spend some time with Lightroom’s sharpening and noise reduction sliders to close the gap a little, but it’s hard to get close to what Capture One and PhotoLab do straight out of the box.
I took this shot at ISO 400, and this noise levels in PhotoLab are still pretty low. If I want better quality still I can use DxO’s DeepPRIME XD processing. It takes a few seconds longer to export a processed image, but the result is an exceptional level of detail and clarity – and the higher you push the ISO, the more amazing the transformation. With the edits I apply to this image, it eliminates increased noise from the heavy processing in the sky area.
2. Lens corrections
Lightroom can apply automatic lens corrections to fix distortion, chromatic aberration and corner shading, and it does a great job. But DxO PhotoLab goes further. DxO’s lens corrections also counteract edge softness – the decrease in sharpness towards the edge of the frame exhibited by most lenses. It’s especially helpful here because the M.Zuiko 12mm f/2 prime I was shooting with does suffer from a little edge softness.
But there’s something else that DxO’s corrections do that’s very useful. This also comes up in my recent post on Capture One’s wideangle lens corrections. Wideangle lenses typically suffer from barrel distortion, so lens corrections ‘push’ the corners of the images outwards as they correct this. This means the image area is increased by a little or a lot, depending on the lens. Now Lightroom will just discard any extra image area created outside the original crop, but with DxO PhotoLab you can switch to an ‘Unconstrained’ crop to use it all for a larger overall image area.
Here, I’ve just gained a little extra height at the top and bottom of the image, but it’s still worth having. With other lenses with more distortion (and hence more distortion correction) you can gain a whole lot more.
3. Local adjustments
For this image I wanted to apply a graduated filter effect to progressively darken the sky but without darkening the sea wall at the same time. PhotoLab has the perfect tool for this – the Control Line. This is effectively a linear gradient but with an eyedropper so that you can select the tones you want to modify and it will leave the rest unaltered. In this case, that meant placing the eyedropper on a light area of the overcast sky. You do sometimes need to make some adjustments to the Mask Selectivity Chroma and Luma sliders and the eyedropper positioning, but it’s a very effective tool.
Lightroom does not have an equivalent. I guess I could create a regular linear gradient and then manually erase the mask on the sea wall… but what about the AI Sky mask tool? That’s fine, but it creates a ‘flat’ sky mask with no gradation, so it looks unnatural when you make adjustments. To get round this you can intersect a sky mask with a linear gradient, but already it’s getting complicated.
The other useful local adjustment in PhotoLab is the Control Point, a long-standing DxO feature. With Control points it’s easy to select and mask specific areas while restricting ‘overspill’ into the surroundings. With practice, it’s a quick way to get natural-looking local adjustments, something that’s not so easy with Lightroom’s AI masks, clever as they are.
Lightroom vs PhotoLab
Both programs have pros and cons. Lightroom is fast, effective and popular. But for overall image and control, DxO PhotoLab did the best job for this image. If you are a Micro Four Thirds shooter, you should definitely check it out – I think you’ll discover a level of quality in the RAW files that Lightroom just doesn’t show you.
