Price:
£209/$229 Website: dxo.com
PhotoLab 8 Elite is the latest version of DxO’s flagship photo-editing software. (There’s a less powerful Essentials edition for £129/$139.) It’s an interesting alternative to Lightroom and Capture One, with a little less emphasis on photo-organising and cataloguing tools and a lot more on high ‐quality RAW processing.
In fact, if you shoot RAW files to get the best possible quality from your camera, PhotoLab needs to be considered as among the best photo-editing software applications for the job.
PhotoLab 8’s key features include DxO’s proprietary DeepPRIME noise-reduction and detail-enhancement process, which can achieve amazing results with high-ISO images; and its lab-derived lens-correction profiles, which don’t just correct distortion, corner shading and chromatic aberration, but also the progressive loss of sharpness towards the edges of the frame shown by most lenses.
PhotoLab 8 also has powerful local adjustment tools and masking options. These don’t follow the current trend towards AI subject recognition, but instead use DxO’s own U-point masking technology, which is a very different, but powerful alternative.