Read reviews, compare customer ratings, see screenshots, and learn more about DxO OpticsPro for Photos. Download DxO OpticsPro for Photos for macOS.
![]() DxO Optics Pro Software For Art
Original fisheye image, Death Valley. Roll mouse over to see after rectification in DxO. Canon 24-105mm f/4 L IS at 24mm, full-frame. Roll mouse-over to see after fully automatic distortion, vignetting and shadow lighting correction in DxO. Try the free demo, then I'd get mine here (Elite) or here (Standard). It helps me publish this site when you get yours from those links, too. See much better photo examples at my Death Valley 2007 and Route 66 galleries. December 2009 NEW: New DxO modules. (all modules) June 2010 INTRODUCTION
DxO Optics Pro is a program which automatically and completely corrects for lens distortion (even from fisheyes), color fringing and vignetting, and even corrects for unsharpness as needed. It does this by reading the EXIF so it knows exactly what camera, lens and settings you used, and then uses the specific measurements DxO made in its laboratory to apply perfect correction to your image. Better, it also improves the artistic aspects of color, highlight and shadow, when lighting gets too harsh. Technically, it also can do a bang-up job of cleaning up high-ISO noise, again specifically corrected as measured in DXO's labs for your camera. I started using DxO at version 4 in 2007, as detailed farther below. As of November 2009, DxO has just released version 6 of DxO Optics Pro. The new version 6 of Optics Pro is out for WIndows, but the Mac version won't be out until 2010. DxO Optics Pro is software that perfectly and automatically (by reading the EXIF) corrects lens distortion, improves lens sharpness as needed, and does the best job I've ever seen of automatically optimizing highlights and shadows. Not only does it do a perfect job of correcting the complex distortion of ultra-wide zooms, it creates perfect straightening of fisheye images, regardless of focused distance, and that was even in version 4 that I've been using. Unlike other shadow and highlight programs (or Photoshop or Lightroom themselves), DxO magically knows how to apply just the right amount of whatever to get my photos to sing, automatically. I last used old version 4 for my photos on Rt 66 back in 2007, and it worked wonders. I pointed DxO to the photos I wanted, it crunched the numbers, and out popped perfected images. New in version 6 is the ability to remove noise and even push-process images two stops past the highest ISO on your camera. That's right: shoot your D3 at ISO 12,800 in raw, and processed through DxO they showed me it looking better than when processed in ACR or Capture NX. Even crazier, set your camera, like a Canon G10, to underexpose by using negative exposure compensation, and DxO can push the image a stop or two to get you ISO two to four times the maximum that you thought you had on your camera. Optics Pro works with both raw and JPG images, but to get the extraordinary noise reduction performance they showed me, it has to do that from raw files. Of course you can control it manually, but for a guy like me that would rather be shooting than playing on a computer, the fact that DxO can be trusted to do its own thing, and do it extremely well, is a Godsend. When you buy it. you buy a license to run it on two computers, just like Photoshop. Dxo Optics pro is compatible with Lightroom 2. It can browse Lightroom catalogs, export back to to lightroom catalogs, and you can call up DxO as an external editor from inside Lightroom by right-clicking and selecting 'send to DxO.' Another advantage of DxO over most other software is that it doesn't need to create a duplicate-copy library of all your photos, as Aperture, iPhoto and Lightroom do by default. It it these stupid libraries which cause the compatibility problems where you need to get things in and out of 'libraries.' With DxO, it works with images as they are stored in my regular file system. Other software makes duplicates of everything you 'import' into them, and with the amount I shoot, I can't afford that. With DxO, you show it what photos you want processed, and it goes to work. DxO 6 has the ability to split-screen 'virtual copies' of different sets of manual corrections. These virtual copies only exist in the software; they don't clog up more hard drive space. DxO Optics Pro 6 makes it easy to store and recall presets of settings you might like. There is a Presets box near the top right in the Customize tab, and in the other tabs, simply right-click a thumbnail image to use presets. If you bought Optics Pro v5 since June 2009 you get a free upgrade to v6. If your copy of v5 is older, you get a 40% discount on the upgrade through 31 December 2009. If you're new to DxO Optics Pro, there is a 33% discount through 31 December 2009. So? The Mac version won't be out until 2010. For Mac, as of course I use, the key is to buy or upgrade to version 5 today, and then the upgrade to v6 ought to be free when v6 becomes available for Mac. The rest is my review from 2007 of version 4. Janvier 2007 NEW: March, 2007: Version 4.2 was released. This entire review is of version 4.1 from January. The new version processes much faster and harder on my Mac Quad G5: it runs all four CPUs at 100% and causes my fans to spin up and my computer to draw 190 watts more power form the wall while processing! It processes four images in parallel and takes an average of only 9 seconds per image from my Canon 5D in batch mode. Guess what? 190 Watts is a quarter-horsepower! Yes, DxO uses a quarter HP while it's processing Images!
I have it chewing on 60 images in series parallel as I write this. It's got my Mac Quad G5's fans blowing like a hurricane, and everything else, like Dreamweaver on which I write this and my browser and email, are humming along as if nothing else is happening. DxO is expanding a bunch of fisheye shots of real estate interiors. I rectify them as a batch, and sort them out after conversion.
The rest of this review now proceeds as written in January: This software package from DxO really works, it's easy, and it works insanely well.
All these examples are from my first day of fooling around. I could spend a lifetime trying to show everything this package does. What I can't show is how magically it identifies everything about the file, and just does what it needs to automatically.
Get this package if you worry about lens defects or want to convert your fisheye images into useful linear images. Most people don't need either of those, so if you don't think you need it, you don't.
If you worry about distortion, light falloff and color fringes, just go get this. It works! It corrects conventional lens defects as well as converting fisheye images back to regular, and much more.
It's not a hoax: DxO has measured the optical transfer functions of the cameras and lenses it supports. The software applies the inverse of these previously measured transforms to your files to correct them exactly. DxO also makes the advanced analyzer software used to make these measurements, a key competence lacking in other software companies.
For thirty years I've been looking forward to when I could transform (stretch out) my fisheye images back into something useful. It's just math, but back in the 1970s the technology to do this wasn't something anyone but first-world governments could afford. I wanted to project my slides back through my fisheye lens, but no projector had a condenser set up for that, and that would melt my lens anyway. (IMAX uses a similar process.)
DxO is easy to get and use. Buy the version for your camera, and every lens they've characterized is included. Gone are the old days when they used to sell lens data separately. Hooray!
Automatic Optical Adjustments
DxO Optics Pro corrects optical imperfections. It fixes:
1.) Distortion (curved or wavy lines that are supposed to be ruler-straight),
2.) Lateral chromatic aberration (color fringes),
3.) Light falloff (darkened corners), and even corrects
4.) Some lenses' tendency to get softer in the corners.
It can't correct for your own stupidity if you forgot to focus.
It improves greatly on the performance of most of my lenses. It really works!
The accuracy of these corrections is far better than anything I've been able to hack in Photoshop. DxO does this so well because they've measured all the supported cameras and lenses in their lab. The software then corrects exactly based on the exact settings used, even for focus distance!
Baby photo by wife. Roll mouse over to see distortion correction. Also note how delicately DxO lightened the background. Nikon D200, SB-600 in bounce mode, Nikon 18-200mm VR at 18mm. Distortion and the dark background corrected automatically. I had to correct the tilts by moving sliders and cursors, which is why the after shot on mouse over zooms in a little. When you rotate you lose the corners and have to crop more tightly.
Other Automatic Adjustments
Unlike my camera and lens reviews, where I go into far more detail than any reasonable person ever needs to know, this software package does far more than I'll ever be able to explore. I got it for correcting optical defects and for rectifying fisheye images.
I already got my $300 worth just with the automated lens corrections, and I only needed to spring for the $300 version to cover my Canon 5D. The $150 version is all you need if you're using any of the lesser Canons, or any Nikon up to and including the D200.
Spend an hour or two reading the unusually clear user's manual and there's another $700 worth of features very clearly explained. It works much easier, faster and more intuitively than you'd expect. I had no idea these other features were in there, too.
DxO Optics Pro fixes these automatically, meaning no inputs are needed to go off and optimize these:
1.) Automatically knows when to lighten dark shadows and other areas, and does it well. If you have a good shot, it leaves it alone. If you have a crappy one with overly contrasty light, only then does it fire itself up and dial in just the right amount of lightening. It does all this by magic, and you can tone down this feature, or turn it off, if you prefer.
Here's a typical example:
Canon 15mm on Full-Frame 5D. Roll mouse over to see after DxO in maximum width mode.
Canon 15mm on Full-Frame 5D. Roll mouse over to see after DxO in maximum width mode.
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