DxO PhotoLab 9 - The First Look

Are you ready to take your photo editing skills to the next level? DxO PhotoLab 9 — now powered by cutting-edge AI technology.

Are you ready to take your photo editing skills to the next level? Today I'm diving into the brand new DxO PhotoLab 9, now powered by cutting-edge AI technology. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, stick around as I put the latest features to the test and show you exactly how DxO is changing the game. Let's jump in and explore what makes this update so exciting.

Hi, my name is Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop and this is Coffee Break Photography.

DxO's PhotoLab is the core editing software in the range of photography products offered by this innovative French company. It's kind of a challenger to Adobe Lightroom, but with one significant difference. Lightroom and other similar tools often use the concept of a catalog where photos are imported into the program and any changes you make to either metadata or when you're editing are written into the catalog. You can see this in action on my video, Lightroom Day One, Setting Up For Success. PhotoLab just uses the image files that are stored on your hard drive and that can make getting started so much easier. However, for me, it also needs you to have a good strategy for where you store your photos as you load them off your camera and onto your computer.

This is the ninth iteration of PhotoLab and the biggest change is the introduction of AI to the editing process. You may have seen the launch video for DxO's Nik Collection Suite back in May where they used the power of Photoshop's AI capability to enhance the editing process. Well, now it's been built into the software and DxO has its own proprietary AI helping to speed up the editing process.

Before I head into the software to show you the changes to PhotoLab, I would love to hear what you think about the increased use of AI in editing. Add a comment down here and let's get a conversation going.

Okay, let's head to the DxO PhotoLab 9.

I want to start off by showing how we can select certain parts of the photo using local adjustments. Okay, so here's our first image. This is a shopping center in the middle of Edinburgh called the St James Quarter. What I'm going to do is just apply some very quick simple changes to the PhotoLab 9 product by hitting okay for DxO Smart Lighting and okay for DxO ClearView Plus. And you see without actually doing anything other than using the default settings on DxO, we've already got a quite improved image and you can see the change from start to finish by looking at the start is on the left, finish on the right.

So we're going to start using the new tools in terms of the local adjustments. So click on the little icon up here. All I'm going to do is to tell it what to use local adjustments and I've got this tool selected down here which is a selection tool. So if I click on the wall, you can see it's included that as a selection. Click on there and you can see that's now added as a mask over here. So we've selected the wall. If I want to add into this side as well, just hold the shift key down, click on there and you can see that's now been added to the mask. And if I hover over any of the editing tools, we can see that we can now edit these tools. I can change the highlights, I can change any of these settings below here and that applies to both elements of this mask together. Okay, so that's one really good way of adding that into there.

You can see that the selection has included parts of the windows. But what if you want to exclude these elements of the selection? Well, that's simple enough.

Okay, so to remove elements from a mask, what we're going to do is make sure that the mask is still selected up here and I'm now going to hover over the window and click on the option or the alt key for Windows users and that then removes that element from the mask. So if I hover over any area now with the mask, you can see that's been excluded. So I can do the same with these windows on the right-hand side. Take that out and I think this window here was also selected. So now you can see the mask. I've done a really good selection, taking out all those and again I can just apply any changes to those areas using the tools on the right-hand side.

So far, we've been selecting elements in the pictures by hovering over and letting the software determine where the selection will take place. DxO has made it even smarter with the introduction of AI tools. We'll stay in the local adjustments part of the editing, but this time we're going to use predefined masks driven by artificial intelligence. Let's use this photo of a performer at the Edinburgh Fringe.

I'm going to go into the local adjustments tool and this time we're going to come down to this little box on the bottom, it's got like a little shape of a person. Click on people and that's going to go away and analyze the image and it's going to identify, do a fairly good job, the person that's in this image. So again I can apply any of the changes to the image by clicking over here. So increasing the highlights for instance is going to just brighten up the face a little. And it's also brightening up the hair, it's brightening up the body as well. So what if I wanted to just apply an edit to just the face? Well, just click on the icon down here and you can see we have an icon for faces.

Again, it's going to go away and it's done a really good job of selecting the face. It's included a little bit of the neck area and you can see there's a few hairs also been chosen in here, but it's done a pretty good job. So I'm quite happy with this as a selection.

Well, that's great. We have a single subject, but you'll note that it says people and not person. So let's try out the selections using more than one person. Again, we have three performers at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Okay, so here's our second image from the Edinburgh Festival. Click on local adjustments again and we're going to use the option people. And this time you can see it's going to go away and it's going to select all three of the people and it's done a really, really good job. Yeah, if you look, we've got all the complexity of all the different types of clothing that's being worn, but it's excluded the drum from the subject. So again that's done a really, really good job.

You've probably spotted that we can select areas of images other than people. In this situation, we are able to select skies, subjects, backgrounds, animals, flowers, and vehicles.

When I'm doing these reviews, I'll always tell you if I'm being given something for free. I never take a payment for reviewing a product. I have been given a preview copy of PhotoLab 9, but if I want to keep using it, then I'll need to buy it. I'll only recommend a product if I think I would spend my money on it. So let's see how effective the AI selections really are.

Let's start with this shot looking across the Edinburgh skyline from Carlton Hill.

So here's the image. You can see that I've applied the DxO ClearView Plus and DxO Smart Lighting to this photograph. And we're going to go to the local adjustments tool and this time we're going to take the option sky.

So it goes away and you see this is quite a complex sky here. We've got various different hills and mountains and if I zoom in to the shot, you can see it's done a really good job of selecting those hills. There's a tiny bit of space it's lost a little bit. You can see that's not been included in the selection and this area here inside the two columns has also been excluded, but I think that's a pretty good job and it's certainly as good as anything I've seen in other areas. There's a tiny little bit in that area that's also not been selected.

What if we've created a local adjustment and we want to apply that to a similar image? No problem. You can apply these settings very easily.

So I'm going to start with this picture where we've already applied the mask to the sky. And I'm going to come up to the top and take the image menu and I'm going to copy the correction settings that have been applied to this image and the new image I'm going to apply is this one which was taken just before we had a huge rainstorm coming and basically stopped me shooting for about 10, 15 minutes while the rain passed over. We're going to go back up to the image menu and we're going to paste correction settings and we have four options. We can paste all correction settings, paste selected corrections, so you can determine which of the different options we've changed been in there or just paste the local adjustments. And if I'm choosing this time paste local adjustments, it's going to go away to that same selection of the sky and it's going to apply that based upon the new areas we've got here.

Took a little bit of time. Now there is a little bit of a problem here. This should go away and it should apply the changes based upon the areas which have been selected by AI.

But you can probably see, I'll zoom into these two pictures. You can see that the areas which were selected really well last time haven't been applied and if I come into the the monument, the Dugald Stewart Monument, you can see it's not done a great job of selecting. So it appears that it's more almost copied the areas that were selected in the last image and just applied those into here. So this is something that definitely needs to be looked out and needs to be thought about about how you can apply a local adjustment that's been copied from one image and apply that applying the same AI changes.

I think you can see the sky selections are pretty good, but there is some room for improvement.

I'm going to really push the software to the limit with this next shot. I took this picture of a red panda in Edinburgh Zoo. The animal is pretty clear in the shot, but there are distracting elements of bamboo leaves in front of the shot and there are also other leaves out of focus in the foreground. Let's give it a go.

So I love this image of a red panda. You know, it really shows it as if it's out in the wild despite it being taken in a zoo and you can see the problems. You know, we've got some bamboo just sticking in front of the panda and this kind of softer area here is as we're shooting through leaves in the foreground. They've just fallen outside of the depth of field, so we get quite a nice bokeh effect which is framing the red panda in the image. So the first thing I'm going to do is apply the ClearView Plus tray setting, apply the Smart Lighting setting, really nice shot. Go up to local adjustments and this time I'm going to choose animals. So it should be going away and detecting a very clear animal inside there and you can see it's popped up with an error message telling me it can't find anything to match the selection. A little bit disappointing.

Let's see whether we can select it as a subject and still it's not identifying this as a subject. So this is something where again I think whatever the AI tools that have been training the model, I'm not sure it's doing such a great job in identifying when animals have got something obscuring in front of them. So a little bit more work required by DxO for this one.

I think you can see that PhotoLab 9 has got the potential to offer something akin to Lightroom, but there's a lot more work to be done to get the AI working better. To be honest, I tried the masking tool in Lightroom on the last picture of the red panda. It did identify the animal as a subject, but it also included the leaves as part of that same subject. So nobody has got this technology working perfect, but it feels like DxO is running maybe a little behind some of its competitors.

That said, I had a session with a client of mine who is looking for help in setting up an editing process. For various reasons, they like the simplicity of the cloud version of Lightroom, but they live in an area with a very slow internet connection. As a result, each image is taking 20 minutes plus to go up to the cloud, pull the data down and then send back. So once the embargo on the trial version is lifted, I'll be recommending to them that they give PhotoLab 9 a go. It's a powerful editing tool with some quick shortcuts to getting great results with the likes of Smart Lighting, ClearView Plus and the industry-leading de-noising and de-mosaicing tools that are also built into the DxO PureRAW 5 program.

Incidentally, in this version of PhotoLab 9, the DeepPRIME XD 3 extra trans model which is in beta in PureRAW 5 has now moved into full functionality and this will be also rolled out in an update to PureRAW 5.

As with all of DxO products, you'll be able to try out the new version with a fully functional free trial. If you want to go ahead and buy as a new customer, it will set you back £219.99 or $239.99 or euro.Upgrading from either PhotoLab 7 or 8 will cost £109.99 in the UK or $119.99 or Euros. I'll add an affiliate link below the video.

So what do you think? Is this a good update to the PhotoLab product? Let me know your thoughts below in the comments.

Well, thanks so much for joining me today. If you found this video helpful, please don't forget to give it a thumbs up and share it with your fellow photographers. Let's spread the love for great photography tools. And if you want to stay up to date with the latest tips, reviews and exclusive offers, hit the subscribe button to my community. I'd love to hear your thoughts and any questions you have in the comment section below.

My name is Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop and this has been Coffee Break Photography. Until next time, keep shooting.