An ACDSee User's Perspective on DXO Optics Pro 10

A Good Tool

I'm an ACDSee Ultimate 9 user, but I just completed a trial of DXO Optics Pro 10.  This is a VERY brief discussion the DXO product.   This is NOT a review of DXO, merely a description of my perceptions of the product.

Actually I liked it pretty well.  I was particularly impressed with the CA/Purple fringing control. And, the auto correction tool shows a maturity that ACDSee Ultimate 9, which just introduced auto correction, simply doesn't have yet.  

Lots of lens and camera combinations in the DXO lens correction database that ACDSee doesn't have.  Especially in the area of Olympus 4/3s DSLR lenses teamed up with m43s cameras.  This will improve, I'm sure, when ACDSee comes out with the infrastructure on how to add lenses to the database ACDSee is using.

The image quality of the finished product was quite high, however I am used to a  more minimalist approach to the raw development software automatically adding in auto sharpening and noise control whenever an image is accessed via the program.  DXO made some things too crisp and sharp, I thought, for images that already had sharpness and NR already added.  I found myself backing that stuff out a bit on those sort of photos.  Not a major issue to be sure, but it was one of those minor irritants I could get used to if I had to.

You need to remember, DXO is a pure raw converter, that means there is NO database or DAM management tools built into it. So you will need some sort of front end to handle that sort of thing. I should think that if I were to use DXO, I would use ACDSee 19 (Their basic viewer/DAM software) instead of Ultimate, though Ultimate 9 worked well enough during my testing.

Overall, however, I don't feel DXO offered me enough reasons to incorporate it into my workflow. Image quality was VERY good, but so is ACDSee Ultimate 9's IQ. And by staying with one vendor from import to organizing, to raw development, to bit mapped editing, and then to distribution, I have a single set of color control tools at all times and most importantly, a single user interface. To me, the idea of a consistent user interface is a major productivity asset all by itself.

In summary, I think DXO is a fine product. I could recommend it to someone who is dissatisfied with their current processor so long as they understood that they would have to provide a separate DAM tool and bit mapped editor for a complete workflow set up.