DxO PhotoLab or Lightroom?

 

There are many photographers who start to get angry with Adobe due to their unfriendly conditions. As far as I understand it the problem is mainly how the ownership of pictures uploaded to the Adobe cloud is handled. I do not use the cloud, so I cannot say anything about this issue. My subscription is the basic one, including Lightroom and Photoshop and a little bit of cloud storage which I do not need. My most used application is Lightroom Classic, followed by Photoshop.

Recently, some influencers started to promote PhotoLab as a replacement for the Adobe basic suit. I find this advice misleading, to say the least. DxO PhotoLab may be a good software to edit RAW images, but it is not at all a replacement for the Adobe suite, not by far.

The most obvious omission is Photoshop. This software is a standard in professional image editing. I understand that not everyone needs Photoshop, and most get along with Lightroom. After all, this is what Lightroom was made for. But a mere RAW editor cannot be compared to a professional package.

Let us view PhotoLab as a replacement for Lightroom for a moment. I should start with admitting that I have only recently installed the test version of PhotoLab 8. So I need to be careful what I write. But so far I can tell that I'd miss too much if I switched to PhotoLab. I'd have to use external programs for things like GPS tagging, focus stacking, panoramas, renaming exported files and more.

With my limited experience, I should remain silent about other details which I found missing or lacking. My first impression is that Lightroom is faster and more easy to handle. But that could be biased by years of Lightroom experience. 

As an example, here is the same picture from the start, this time edited with PhotoLab. The result is inferior and it was more difficult to achieve. But that is probably completely my fault. It should be possible to get the same results. This is not a difficult image, nor a beautiful one. So, I end this kind of comparison for the time being.

Of course, I tried the denoise tool, testing the most advanced algorithm in PhotoLab 8. It works well. But on the files I tried I could actually get the same result in Lightroom, not even using their AI enhanced routine. More testing will have follow. The result below of an image at ISO3200 is not different from what I got with Lightroom. I also tried this at ISO32000, but the results are unusable in both systems. 

Note that you can see the original JPEG file if you click on the image and right click on the image viewer to open the file in a new window. You will see that the noise reduction and sharpening of PhotoLab is very convincing.

PhotoLab makes a big fuss about the way, files are handled. Actually, it is not that much different from Lightroom. Both programs leave the files where they are. Lightroom imports links to a catalogue, even from very different locations. PhotoLab does not do this, but uses the file structure. In this new version of the program, projects can be generated which work almost like catalogues. More than one project can be generated from the same files. In Lightroom, you use collections for this. Lightroom can generate side files containing the edits, just as PhotoLab does by default. I found the differences marginal. But I like the import feature of Lightroom which can copy files from the SD card to the drive, something I could not find in PhotoLab.

Many will like PhotoLab because it is sold and does not require a subscription. Subscriptions allow and even force developers to update their software and fix errors. The continuous flow of money keeps their business alive. On the other hand, it is not easy for the customer to end a subscription because the software will no longer work. I know photographers who still work with Lightroom 6, which was the last version you could buy. But you should know that you can still see your old edits if you end the subscription to Lightroom. You just cannot change them anymore.

Financially, there is not much difference if you always update to the latest version of PhotoLab, and compare with the basic subscription of the Adobe suite. I know photographers who spend thousands on photographic gear and fly to Island just to get the same shots as everybody else, but lament about their Lightroom subscription. If you are a student and just start with a cheap camera system, I suggest using the RAW editor that comes with your camera for free, or any of the open alternatives.