Practical Raw Conversion in Photos

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.

rvsarch about DxO OpticsPro for Photos