DxO had two announcements yesterday.
First, DxO PhotoLab 6.4 now supports the High Efficiency raw formats of the Z9. In addition, the 100-400mm f/4-5.6 VR S lens has been added to the DxO downloadable corrections (which are different than the built-in camera corrections).
PhotoLab is sort of a darkhorse in the raw conversion world, and gets overlooked by many. Particularly those that might have looked at PhotoLab in its infancy. It’s now a mature product that produces excellent results, and has that excellent PRIME noise reduction capability that's state-of-the-art (though slower than just moving Adobe’s sliders).
Which brings me to DxO's other announcement: DxO PureRaw 3.0.
I was skeptical of PureRaw when it was first introduced, but particularly with this latest installment, have come to appreciate it. While it introduces another step in raw conversion, it does so in a unique way: basically you drag a raw file(s) to PureRaw, which applies the PRIME noise reduction on the undemosaiced data (it can also apply all the DxO lens corrections) to produce a DNG file.
I’ll get around to fully demonstrating the usefulness of PureRaw when I return from my Internet-free month in May, but it’s a useful mitigation to using a Z9 at very high ISO values. What I do at the moment is mark images in Photo Mechanic with a particular rating if I think they need noise reduction, select all with that rating, and then drag those tagged images to PureRaw. Because PureRaw can run as a batch and creates DNG files, I can just stuff those back into the same folder they came from. If I want work on the original, I convert the NEF. If I want to work on a noise reduced original, I convert the DNG.
Disclosure: I was given very early access to PureRaw 3.0 for testing.
