DxO OpticsPro for Photos App Reviews

Simplistic and heavy handed corrections. The Optical Corrections work well. Perhaps if one could control the amount of effect with an adjustment slider it would be a worthwhile purchase.

Thank you, DxO! You have provided exactly what I needed. I rely upon lens corrections for my Canon EOS M and 22mm f2.0 lens–vignetting and edge distortion ruined an otherwise fast, cheap, decent quality lens, but there wasn’t an option in Photos to correct those issues easily. The Optical Corrections in this extension ALONE are worth the price. Took photos that were otherwise unusable and made them worth keeping. Beyond that, the noise reduction included in this DxO extension far outpaces what is built into Photos with a well balanced algorithm in two modes: High Quality and Prime. HQ is what I seem to use–takes less time process the photos–but if you have some very grainy, noisy photos, Prime has a good chance of saving them. And, if you want, there is also a haze removal which works well, if only in limited situations. The Smart Lighting feature is hit or miss for me. White Balance is similar to what’s included natively in the Photos App. Regardless, this is precisely what I needed. Thank You, DxO! If you are reading this, DxO and Apple, and are not in the process of doing so already, please consider adding a feature for batch processing with extensions. Processing with DxO for each photo, one at a time, is a bit painful if you have a good number of photos to go through. Thanks!

Only occasionally will the software recognize my Panasonic Lumix GX-7 and either my Panasonic 12-35mm 2.8 or 20mm 1.7 lenses. Both the camera and the lenses are recognized on the DxO website. Every so often an image will recognize my setup, but the very next picture taken seconds apart will not recognize. Some sort of bug which renders the software useless.

Having seen some mixed reviews related to possible bugs in this initial release (including from a trusted digital photography blogger whom I rely on a lot), I was hoping for the best but prepared that this might not work for me. Well, I was delighted with my first attempt - absolutely flawless taking recent Canon Powershot S90 raw file from my Photos app and applying the default lens corrections - a good improvement! Then I just attempted a white balance adjustment using the cloudy icon - it took a too austere looking overcast day in Paris by the St. Michel Metro stop and gave it just the right touch of warmness. Wow! I am so happy to have a Photos extension that works so well and delivers these sorts of improvements almost instantly. I will update this review as I work with this more over the next week, but here on Christmas morning I can only highly recommend this. And a really great deal with the special pricing!

nothing great about this app, it can do basically what you can do in photo

As a user of DxO software on RAW iimages, and not a fan of Photos for anything except storing images from iPhotos, I had to get this app and see for myself if Photos could eventualy be a real option to process images. This DxO addition to Photos is a promising and useful way to enhance images, though far from the capabilities of DxO 10. At least there is now the hope that Photos can have additions which will make it more useful. Although the DxO for Photos offers limited adjusments, they are adjustements which are not otherwise easily done. It works acceptably fast except for the excellent and advanced noise removal tool (worth the wait.) While Apple seems to be abandoning professional software we are fortunate that DxO has an interest in providing this tool for Photos, and hopeful that other companies will offer serious tweaks as well. At this introductory price it is well worth getting and using this simple, effective, advantageous addition to Photos, and thank you, DxO for elevating Photos to the next level.

Note this adds the 2 key features from the DxO OpticsPro Elite Edition: PRIME denoising and ClearView. Along with the lens corrections included in the Essential Edition. This is a crazy good deal. Even better since it integrates with Photos. My only wish would be for DxO to adapt their PRIME to formats like tiff, but thats really a separate issue.

For the $10 intro price you cannot go wrong with this purchase. Basically it adds the best lens+body optical-correction and best RAW noise reduction to Apple Photos. And while I prefer to use the full-blown combination of DxO Optics Pro together with Adobe Photoshop for all my important photographs, it is nice to be able to just “jump in” to Photos and use DxO as needed for quick edits on snapshots. Smart move on their part IMHO. Now if they could add a lightweight perspective/viewpoint control to Photos I’d be all over that as well.

As of this writing - 1/1/16, this extension is not working as promised. It cannot find optical corrections for my camera, even though it is listed on the website, and there is no option to manually select your camera. Also, the promised “prime” noise option is completely missing from the application, or I cannot find it. Don’t spend your money yet.

I am a professional photographer. I am using a Mac Pro and Macbook Pro each with a 1T SSD and DxO will not work on my machines.

DxO has a good reputation int he phot industry but this app should be priced at $0.99 since the results it provides is seldom worth saving. Save your money … the built in Photos adjustments are better and if you want aperture similar post processing capabilities, try extensions from MacPhun

This app does what the developers say it will do. The lens correction feature works well. The suggested changes it makes are immediately viewable by toggling the M key for comparison with the original. I experienced no issues using it with a batch of 50 raw files. I followed DXO’s suggestion to process the raw files in their app before doing additonal editing. As suggested by others, a batch processing option would be useful but that’s probably a Photos feature problem rather than a DXO issue. I’m an experienced Aperture user and have used many plug-ins and external editors over the years; this one is a keeper, especially for the price. It adds very useful editing tools to the otherwise limited Photos app which I anticipate will continue to improve as Apple refines it in subsequent system updates.

Not bad. Give real power to some aspects of Photos. Definitely get it and add to your list of extensions.

I was looking for a RAW processor that is well integrated to Apple Photos and I am delighted to say that I “found it” with DxO! I hope the software vendor considers developing extensions for their Film Pack software too.

Glad to see some good RAW processing that I can use from the Photos app. Might make me consider using Photos for some primary library storage. Side note: this doesn’t seem to support DNG files like standalone OpticsPro does.

This extension is a very good RAW developer to have for the photos app. It works great with many (but not all) lighting situations. It does a fantastic job with lens correction and noise reduction. Smart lighting and haze removal work, as mentioned, with many but not all photographs. I use it as a first step before passing the image on to other extensions. Disadvantage here (and that is Apples’ fault!!!) is that one can not save TIFF images. I am not sure why it can not do lens correction after the photograph has been worked with in other software and all the exif information is still intact? DXO does in many cases not recognize the camera/lens used after the photo has been altered. I do understand that fringing may not be corrected in this case (and therefore DXO does not make it available), but the lens distortion correction should work. Having this available would allow this extension to be used at the end of the workflow, if smart lighting and other features are not required as a first step. What is missing: - Histogram with highlight/shadow indicator - loupe or another form of zoom-in tool - fine adjustment slider for smart lighting/noise removal & clear-view I do hope they will expand upon this extension and integrate more detailed and sophisticated tools. I am glad I bought it as US $ 10 is a very good value.

There are not too many extensions for Photos at this point, and some are gimmicky, but this one is helpful. The most helpful feature is the one that DxO is known for, lens correction. If you use an iPhone to take your photos, you know that it has a wide-angle lens that gives some images a bowed appearance. This extension fixes that. (One review here states that lens correction only works on RAW files. This is incorrect. It works on original, unedited iPhone photos.) The remaining features are nice, but nonessential. The noise reduction seems pretty good. UPDATE: Having used this extension quite a bit, I am extremely impressed with it. I use it on almost all my iPhone images (the keepers, at least), and it does an excellent job. While I initially didn’t focus on the features other than lens correction, in fact all of them work well.

Been using it for a couple of days and it makes a great difference! Finally my photos look the way I see them when I shoot them without having to take a long time editing them in another software. Controls are simple and you just toggle them on or off for the most part.

I did a quick test with a Sony RX100 and Olympus OM-D EM5 shooting raw plus jpeg of a backlit scene at high ISO. The Sony raw file had a huge amount of noise while the jpeg generated in the camera had decent noise reduction but failed to recover highlights. The DxO extension for Photos did a better job with the noise and recovered a good deal of detail in the blown highlights from the raw file. The Olympus raw file had much less noise. While the jpeg generated by the Olympus did little to recover the highlights, it obliterated details with the built-in noise reduction. Way too aggressive. The DxO extension produced much better result with more detail in the highlights and excellent nosie reduction. Opening the raw files in Photos and using the built in tools, I could not do as well as the DxO extension with these difficult images. The noise reduction adjustment built into Photos was terrible and could not come close to DxO and was worse than the jpeg engines built into either camera. The prime noise correction in DxO is quite slow, taking more than a minute for the Sony raw image, but the results were very good. The toggle from original to processed image is very helpful and most of the presets work well enough. My take is that the jpeg engines in either camera destroy far too much information in the original raw file at high ISO and when there is a lot of dynamic range in the scene. Shooting raw and just using the tools built into the Photos app works fine for most images, but DxO is an easy way to fix more challenging shots quickly. You can always take important raw files out of Photos and do even better. After this little test, I’ve stopped shooting jpegs altogether. It is just too easy to work with raw files now to bother.

I bought this thinking I could work with my Samsung RAW files. The camera was listed on their website. All I get is a graphic of a big exclaimation mark no matter what I do. A complete waste of money for me. Maybe I am missing something.