I’ve used them for work, for my own photography practice, and purely for experimentation. During that time I’ve tested just about every image editor under the sun, from free open-source software to industry-standard software suites. Hi, my name is Thomas Boldt, and I’ve been a digital photographer since the days when you could measure your megapixels with a single digit.

Lightroom “plugin” isn’t a useful workflow. What I Don’t Like: PhotoLibrary still lacking key features.

What I Like: Excellent noise reduction with PRIME. As a result, PhotoLab is best used as a secondary editing option to supplement an existing workflow rather than replacing your existing one. DxO offers a Lightroom plugin with the goal of allowing users to keep Lightroom as their catalog manager, but conflicts between RAW processing engines prevent this from being a viable solution. PhotoLab includes an updated library management tool, but it still needs a lot of additional features before it’s actually ready to replace your current digital asset manager. For photographers focused on color accuracy, this latest version also includes support for DCP profiles. A number of other excellent automatic adjustments simplify the editing process, and newly-added localized editing tools allow you to fine-tune their results more effectively than in the past. As you might expect from them, PhotoLab provides excellent automatic lens corrections and a truly incredible noise reduction algorithm they call PRIME. PhotoLab is a RAW editor from DxO, a company famous for its precision testing of optical equipment.

Capture one vs dxo photolab 4