Using DxO Optics Pro 7 prior to PTGui

[Peter A. Schaible]

Is anyone subscribing to this forum, other than me, using DxO Optics Pro
7 prior to PTGui?

DxO Optics automatically detects the lens and other equipment I'm using,
as well as the shooting parameters for each image. It then immediately
and automatically applies sophisticated optical corrections, dramatic
noise reduction and other adjustments.

I think all this enables me to get good stitches with PTGui that might
otherwise be more challenging.

What has been your experience with DxO Optics Pro 7 used prior to PTGui?

Please advise. Thanks.


--
-- Peter

Peter A. Schaible

[Joergen Geerds]

I think the same rules as with Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) apply: use all the goodies (noise reduction, CA removal, vignetting removal), but turn the lens correction to zero, since ptgui will do a better job for the whole panorama correcting each tile. in other words, you mangle the poor pixel only once, not twice in the process. I do not know dxo optics pro, but try to apply the same development parameters to all images of the same set (exposure, brightness, contrast, WB etc)

[UtahBob]

Peter,

I'm tending to agree with Joergen on the warping but I do have interest in the other aspects of the software.  Have you found the program excellent at removing sensor dust and the like?  Also, does it handing vignetting that is not radially symmetric?  Since PTGui only handles radially symmetric vignetting, anything else has to be preprocessed.  How do you find the noise reduction in comparison to ACR, PS, LR?

Thanks, Bob

[Ray Setzer]

I've been getting good results using dxo. For me a very useful plus is the speed in getting adjustments applies to batches of images. Usually the default setting is all I need

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[Roger D Williams]

Hi, Peter,

I happily used DXO Pro 7 to pre-process images for stitching by PTGui. In fact I started with DXO 2 and have loyally bought all the upgrades that required payment (several were free, of course). I even upgraded to V.8 recently.

It was fine when they provided modules for the lens-camera combinations I was using, but now I have gone over to Pentax cameras it is only useful for my std and wide-angle zoom lenses: the fisheyes I use for panoramas are not supported. Alas, DXO removal of color aberration is not nearly as good as the CA removal function in ACR. For a few panoramas I pre-processed for CA in PhotoShop CS5 and then finished off with DXO but this complicated my workflow, so now I am getting used to working entirely within PS CS5 and will shortly be upgrading to CS6. I still use DXO for my non-panorama photos.

I have been in contact with a senior manager at DXO and gathered that fisheye lenses are seen as too much of a minority interest to merit support. I would go back to it in a blink if they DID support my lenses.

ACR is definitely not awful, but I miss the flexibility and sophistication of DXO controls, and the prescient selection of its default settings...

Roger W

Sent from my iPad

[SunDance]

I'm a charter member of the "I hate PhotoShop and Lightroom" club. When necessary, I use PaintShop Pro. But DxO Optics Pro is my go-to software, and the first one I use, beginning with the conversion from RAW to TIFF.

 

You can try it at no cost.  http://dxo.com/intl/photo/dxo_optics_pro/features

 

I would love to hear your reviews.  One item we don't seem to discuss very much in this forum is work flow. None of us uses PTGui only, so it seems to me to be appropriate to share experiences that include using PTGui in conjunction with other products.

 

Your thoughts?

[mcz...@gmail.com]

I've not used Lightroom, but from reviews, it seems to have much in
common with Dxo.

Very useful for me that I can organize my shots much like they are
organized in Bridge and quickly apply some corrections. I think perhaps
the most used is the color correction, and in Ver 8 I can apply some
additional slight tweaks. Sometimes I also take the Tif output from
PTGui into Photoshop and play with a few adjustment layers if I'm doing
an individual pano and want some specific results, but for volume work
Dxo really helps with re-doing. Judging how that final pano output for
the web is going to really look based on those great raws you have is
sometimes hard. Sometimes it seems the compression shifts red's into
being more saturated, and with Dxo, its a very quick fix to tweak, have
Ptgui put pull in the new tifs and rerun the output.

Lightroom probably does much of the same. I just started with Dxo, got
comfortable with the workflow and stay on that track.

That said, things I with Dxo did.
1. Allowed you to specify specific cropping aspects.
2. Let you change the output on the fly for processing instead of being
wedded to the output templates.
3. Had some good tutorials from some of their more obscure adjustment
settings.
4. The presents good, but I'm surprised that there is not a present
exchange on their forum. You can find some from other people, but not
many and they seem to be spread around.

Ray Setzer
Wivirtual

[Didier]

Maybe good to know for some : DxO v7.x has a bug regarding geotagging : images CANNOT be geotagged after processing by DxO v7.x., whichever exiftool version is used.

This little bug was not present in v6, and has been fixed in v8.

Didier

[l_d_allan]

Ditto. I did a series of panos with and without distortion correction in ACR 6.x to see if it really made a difference.

 

Using the metric of "Lowest Avg/Max CP Distance Error", those made without ACR Distortion Correction (PtGui handles that by itself) "won" in about 10 of 12 examples. When PTGui "lost", it usually was by a minor amount, but PtGui sometimes "won" by a significant amount.

 

(Caveat ... small sample size and there seems to be quite a bit of randomness in selection of CP's between image pairs).