Blog

DxO has yes­ter­day released the new ver­sion 5 of their RAW devel­op­er Pho­to­Lab. For me, the out­stand­ing fea­ture of DxO Pho­to­Lab is the arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-based denois­ing tool Deep­PRIME, which I’ve been using fre­quent­ly and with aston­ish­ing results on my high-ISO shots since DxO Pho­to­Lab 4. The qual­i­ty of the result­ing images is, in my opin­ion, spec­tac­u­lar. I have already writ­ten a detailed review of DxO Pho­to­Lab 4 on this website.

Unlike oth­er tools, the Deep­PRIME algo­rithm works direct­ly with the RAW data and de-nois­es even pri­or to the col­or pro­cess­ing with the De-Bay­er algo­rithm. In com­par­i­son with the fre­quent­ly used tool Topaz Denoise AI, Pho­to­Lab 4 per­forms bet­ter (at least in my opin­ion). You can find a com­par­a­tive test of both tools here.

What’s new in PhotoLab 5?

Accord­ing to DxO, the Deep­PRIME algo­rithm is now faster. DxO claims that it is now 4x faster on M1 Macs and 1.5x faster on PCs than before. The pro­cess­ing options and image man­age­ment have appar­ent­ly also been sig­nif­i­cant­ly improved, but this is not rel­e­vant for me per­son­al­ly at the moment, since I real­ly only use DxO Pho­to­Lab as a RAW con­vert­er for high­ly noisy images. I do all fur­ther pro­cess­ing and image man­age­ment in Light­room Clas­sic, as I am used to for years. So, for me, the only remain­ing advan­tage is the 1.5 times faster pro­cess­ing speed an my PC , which on its own would not require an update.

Nev­er­the­less, a very sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment for me has been inte­grat­ed into ver­sion 5, which made me imme­di­ate­ly decide to upgrade:

Support for DJI Mini 2 and DJI Air 2S RAW files

As inter­est­ed vis­i­tors to my web­site will have noticed, I recent­ly “got into the air” and dis­cov­ered pho­tog­ra­phy with drones for myself. Espe­cial­ly the small sen­sors of drones are sen­si­tive to noise and would cer­tain­ly ben­e­fit from the Deep­PRIME algo­rithm. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, how­ev­er, my drones were not sup­port­ed - until now. The new ver­sion 5 of Pho­to­Lab now sup­ports the DNG files of DJI drones (at least my two drones, the DJI mini 2 and DJI Air 2S are included).

For Fuji pho­tog­ra­phers, DJI has now inte­grat­ed sup­port for the X-Trans sen­sors used there, but cur­rent­ly still in beta. Since I do not use a Fuji cam­era, how­ev­er, this is of no rel­e­vance to me.

I pur­chased DxO Pho­to­Lab 5 myself as an update from my ver­sion 4 with the acti­va­tion code PHOTOLABFILMPACK for € 69.30, and will be test­ing it in more detail soon. A report on this, pos­si­bly also once again with a com­par­i­son with the cur­rent Topaz Denoise AI, will appear here later.

*= Affil­i­ate Link