DxO Comparison to Pentax K-5 JPGs

I ended up buying a copy of DxO. I took advantage of the Xmas/New Year special they were offering and picked it up for $99.

For those that missed my previous posting on DxO and have no idea what it is then here is a quick explanation. DxO is a professional level tool for processing RAW format digital images. DxO is a lot smarter than your average RAW format processing tool such as Adobe Lightroom or the RAW processor built into Adobe Photoshop Elements in that it knows things about almost all of the professional level lenses. It knows what kinds of colourations some lenses introduce, or if they cause vignetting (darkening of the corners), or if they have any barrel distortions and at what lengths and f-stops they have these problems.

Even $5,000 lenses have some kinds of issues, so when DxO processes the RAW into the JPG it fixes these issues up as well.

My wife recently wanted some snaps taking of some vase roses she bought so I thought I would do a couple of little tests of DxO as part of this exercise.

This first picture is the JPG processed in-camera. Obviously to be posted here is has been reduced massively in size (images from the K-5 are 4,928 x 3,264), but apart from resizing, and putting a border around it, no other processing has been done.

Doesn’t look too bad really. But now here is the DxO processed image.

The colours in the second image are much closer to the correct colours. Especially the colour of the rose in the top left area which is an orange/pink and not red (as it appears in the first picture). Also notice how DxO has removed the deep shadows on the leaves.

Here is another example. First the JPG as processed by the camera.

Now the DxO RAW processed image.

Again—the colours in the DxO processed image are much closer to the actual colours and this is the direct first-pass automatic result produced by DxO. You could then go in a do all kinds of tweaking yourself either in DxO or Photoshop, should you want to.

Admittedly having to take RAW images and then do your own RAW to JPG processing is a whole pile of work a lot of people who take pictures just don’t want to have to worry about, but then if you have gone and spent $1,500 or more on an amazing camera and want to get the best possible images then it is something you need to think about.