Iv’e been trying to get some time to do a proper full review of DXO Photo Lab 4 but I’ve been really busy with client projects and some other things, so I haven’t had the time to fully immerse myself in the software yet. However, I have played around with the new “Deep Prime” noise reduction, and I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far.

If you haven’t already read about it, the latest version of DXO Photo Lab includes new noise reduction technology that works a little different from how most noise reduction technologies work. It has two key features. Firstly, it occurs as part of the demosaicing process, rather than on-top of it. Secondly, it uses AI to calculate and implement the noise reduction, having been trained on hundreds of thousands of images. According to the company, the result is a much cleaner image with much more detail retained.

I have to admit, I was skeptical at first, but then I tired it on one of my own Images, and I was blown away. In fact, at first I thought I must have made a mistake it was so dramatic.

I used it on a shot from New York at Sunset that I had taken when there last year. I had taken the shot on my Canon G7X Mark 2 which is a compact, 1” sensor camera, that is no low-light king. The shot was ISO 4000.

First, here’s a crop at 1:1 (100%) of the image with no NR

Next, Here’s Lightroom’s attempt with NR set at 50% (Higher than that it goes to mush - I wanted to try and use a setting I would actually use)

Then, here’s Deep Prime

Finally, here’s the original camera Jpeg.

By the way, every time I do a comparison like this, someone complains that I didn’t do a roll over and it’s impossible to compare if you don’t have a mouse over. Unfortunately there’s no easy way to do that on Squarespace, so this is the best I can do.

There is one rather big downside to this though. Unless I’m doing something stupid, (and I have seen others note this too) you can’t see it previewed in the main viewer. You only see it in the small preview window. In order to see it on your full image you need to export. Apparently the reason for this is because it’s computationally intensive, and as it happens at the start of the stack, if you allowed it to be “live” it would take ages every time you made an adjustment. That’s the (unofficial) explanation I’ve seen anyway. Whether that’s true or not is another thing.

Anyway, this is just a quick test. When I get time I will do more detailed comparisons, but I was impressed by this so I thought I’d share it. If you want to try this yourself, I believe there’s a 30 day trial available. You’ll need the elite version for this to work.

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