By David Rosenthal.

DxO Optics Pro v3.5 is many things at once. You can improve the quality of any image with it (JPEG or RAW), convert from RAW to JPEG, TIFF, or DNG. What's unique about DxO is that they have profiled cameras and lenses in such a way that just by reading your EXIF information the application can optimize your image, because it knows what to do with x camera with y lens at z settings. It's pretty amazing.

You can use the application in any of three modes: Fully Automatic, Key Controls or Expert Controls.

Here you see the window for Fully Automatic, with one shot in it. What you can do here is REALLY basic, and this view is really here for you to collect the shots you want to batch, and then start the batch. That's it.

CAVEAT: I will be using only full automatic settings in both Camera Raw and DxO. I won't be optimizing the output of either. This may not be fair, since many of you would never accept automatic settings from Photoshop. Well, you just might in DxO, and that's what we're going to compare. Auto to auto.

Here are the settings you have available in "Key Controls" mode. Here you have pretty much everything that you're probably used to having in a RAW converter.


Click on the image if you want to see it bigger.

The next several images show the options available in Expert Controls. Here is Color and Exposure.


Again, click on the image if you want to see it bigger.

DxO Optics.

DxO Lighting.

DxO Noise.

Sharpening.

Image Information.

Output Settings.

This is the preferences window. I'm not going to go through all of them, but here is the Output Settings for JPEG.