if i said i could upgrade your camera to produce sharper more detailed images with less noise and
distortion would you be interested well that seems to be what dxo is offering with its purer software
hello i'm robin whalley and welcome to lenscraft today i have a beta copy of the new dxo pure raw 2
which is released on the 16th of march 2022 in this video i'll be demonstrating the software
walking you through the improvements and sharing my thoughts about the claim quality but before
we look at the new software we need a quick look at the old version of purer to appreciate these
improvements as you watch this remember that the idea is that you use purer as a raw pre-processor
it's aimed mainly at lightroom users although you can use it with any software that can process a
dng file with that in mind the first issue was that you couldn't launch purer from inside of
lightroom what you needed to do was open the software first you would then select the raw
files that you might want to process i have a batch of sample raw files in a folder that
we can use for this when i add them you can see the raw file thumbnails six of the files though
are from my fuji xt3 which isn't a supported camera and so we see this warning message i'll
pick a raw file from my panasonic g9 and one from the nikon d800 but i'll deselect the rest
i can then click the process photos button don't worry about the options in dialogue for now we'll
go through those later in the video i can though see an estimated processing time for the two
files which is 44 seconds then i'll click the process button to start the raw file processing
when the processing is complete i can either view the results or use the export option to export
the images to my software in this case i want to export the process files to adobe lightroom
classic i'm then switched into lightroom where i can import the process dng files to my lightroom
catalog now i have the dng files alongside my original raw files the most impressive thing about
purer including the old version of the software is the image quality but we'll look at that later in
this video whilst it's still possible to use the new version of pureline the same way there are two
more extremely useful options the first of these is to process the raw file from my finder window
if you're using a windows pc you can do the same thing but with your file explorer
before i can demonstrate this on my mac though there's an extra step i need to take after
installation which is to activate the purer finder extension in the mac system preferences
after opening the system preferences dialog i can choose the extension option then in the added
extension section i need to find the dxo pure or2 option this is where you'll see the finder
extension option which you can click to turn on and off the option needs to be ticked for the
new purer feature to be available now let me show you what happens when i right click on a raw file
in the pop-up menu you can see there are three new pure or quick actions at the bottom of the menu
these give me the options to process the raw file using my last purer settings or i can choose
to process the raw file to either a dng or jpeg format let's use the dng option where i can choose
the conversion method i'm going to use d prime for this conversion we then see a progress bar
and after the processing completes a message is displayed now we have a new dxo folder containing
the converted dng file this is a great feature for someone who wants to convert a batch of raw
files before importing to their photo library but i'm sure there are other uses as well
now i did run into a problem that i want to mention when i tried to use this feature with
files on an external hard drive the pure raw menu items weren't available i have been in touch with
dxo and they are aware of this and aim to have a fix available before release remember i'm
using a beta version of the software for this review now let's look at another new workflow
the second new workflow in pure raw 2 comes by way of a new lightroom plugin this allows us to select
and process raw files from within lightroom what i like about this is the way that purer integrates
so we don't need to leave lightroom let me show you an example i can select the file or files i
want to process in the lightroom library module then in the file menu i select plugin extras
followed by the option to process with dxo pure raw 2. this launches the pure or 2 dialog
where i can select my processing options at the top we have the raw processing method
this is what determines the demos aching of the raw file as well as applying noise reduction to
the image the three options are hq prime and deep prime but to be honest i can't see any reason
not to use deep prime with everything this will produce superb results in terms of image quality
below this we have the option for global lens sharpening and lens distortion correction you can
turn these on and off independently of each other i know some people find the global lens sharpening
a little bit strong but personally i like to apply both settings with all my files now we come down
to the format option where we can choose to save the processed image as either a jpeg or a dng
file i always use the dng option because i want to process the image further in lightroom and the dng
format preserves the image quality better finally we can select where to output the new file to
for this example we'll use the option to put the file in a dxo folder in the same location as the
original raw file this by the way is the same dialogue that you see if you open and process
images directly in the pure raw 2 application when i click the process button you can see
a progress bar followed by a message when the processing completes i also want to stress that
the raw file remains unchanged by this processing we've simply created a new dng file although you
probably won't see it immediately for that to happen we first need a lightroom to synchronize
the dxo folder containing the new image this is the same approach used by dxo photolab 5 and
i seem to experience the same delay here that i sometimes see when using the photo lab integration
this appears to be down to lightroom rather than being a dxo problem but you should be aware of it
sometimes you think nothing has happened when in reality lightroom just needs to catch up after the
folder synchronizes you'll see a new collection inside the dxo pure raw 2 collection set if i switch
to viewing the sample raw file folder you can see the dxo subfolder with the new dng file inside it
the next improvement to mention in pure raw 2 is the speed of processing for deep prime
dxo photolab elite users have already benefited from speed improvements so it's no surprise
the improvements make their way into pure raw 2 previously i tested the speed claims for photo
lab 5 in my launch review video but i only saw marginal performance improvements that's probably
because my mac computer is old and uses the intel architecture because of this i wasn't expecting to
see any noticeable improvement in pure raw ii but the old version of purer processing a nikon d800
raw file takes me around 28 seconds i also tested some of my panasonic g9 raw files which take
around 16 seconds testing the same files again in pure raw 2 the g9 raw file processing time fell to
15 seconds and sometimes faster and the d800 files dropped to around 24 seconds given i'm using a mac
with the old architecture i'm quite surprised by this improvement if your computer is using
the new apple m1 chip you should see better speed improvements than i did dxo claims that deep prime
can run up to four times faster on the new silicon architecture and that windows users can expect to
see up to one and a half times better performance do remember that this performance improvement is
to deep prime and that there's more processing going on than just that having said that i'm
wearing my real world practical hat dxo pureroy is fast anyway when it comes to total processing time
and out of interest processing an x-trans raw file from my fuji takes only 19 seconds which
brings us neatly onto the next improvement in dxo pure raw 2 for a long time fuji users with
cameras based on x-trans sensors couldn't benefit from dxo processing when i first moved to the fuji
system i processed my images in lightroom and was extremely disappointed by the poor quality
after a lot of testing i eventually switched to capture one solely to process my fuji raw files
then in october last year dxo launched photolab 5 with beta support for the x-trans raw file
since then i've been using photo lab to process my fuji raw files and the results are excellent
now pure raw 2 also supports fuji x-trans raw files and the results are equally good which brings us
nicely onto the topic of image quality the idea behind dxo pure raw is by turning over
parts of your raw processing to it you achieve better results than by only using say lightroom
whether or not this is worth doing depends how much you value image quality let's take an example
raw file that i shot using the panasonic g9 it's a little underexposed so let's correct
that by increasing the exposure slider i'll also pull back the highlights and open the shadows
now let's go back to the library module and i'll copy my develop settings i can then paste the
settings to the dng file produced by purer with the same settings applied to both versions of
the image let's look more closely at the results to do this i've taken both images into photoshop
and have them as separate layers in the same document the first thing i want you to notice
is the distortion correction the image from the pure or dng file has much better correction
and i can even still see some barrel distortion in the lightroom image but there's something else
that's important watch the corners of the image when i turn the pure raw layer off and on you
can see that the lightroom version seems to crop the image and we're missing the edges of the frame
that's because most raw converters tend to stretch and crop raw files when correcting lens distortion
but purer doesn't instead we see the full frame which helps to maintain the wide angle effect
what's the point in spending lots of money on a super wide angle lens if your raw converter then
throws away parts of the image now let's look at the center of the frame and zoom in to 200 percent
when i turn off the pure roll layer you can see that it's noticeably sharper than the lightroom
version and it has better detail that's despite me sharpening the lightroom image
the other difference we can see is the level of noise in the shadows in the lightroom version
so the pure raw image shows better lens correction
has less noise and it's sharper and it's the same story with all the raw files i've tested
here's the example of the fuji raw file from earlier converted with pure raw and lightroom
and here's another fuji raw file the improvement in image quality when using pure raw first
is noticeable but having compared the results from pure raw 2 with the old version of pure raw i
don't believe there is any improvement in image quality the improvements in the new version are
to the workflows and that it can now process fuji x-trans files so what does this cost well
if you're new to pureroll the price is 115 pounds or 129 dollars and it's the same price in euros
existing users can upgrade for 69 pounds or 79 dollars in the game the same in euros initially
i thought this was a little expensive but then i thought about it the quality improvements i'm
seeing across all my raw files make them look like they were shot on more expensive and better lenses
the new plug-in integration with lightroom is also great making it very easy to process and
pre-process all of my raw files and possibly most important is that it's made photography more fun
i don't spend time worrying about iso settings and recovering clean shadow detail
in those terms this now seems like a better deal if someone offered to modify my camera
for 115 pounds so that i was guaranteed to produce noticeably sharper more detailed images with less
noise i would think it was a bargain pureroy is an excellent accessory that i think all lightroom
and adobe camera raw users should consider but having said that i won't be buying dxo pure
that's because i already own dxo photo lab if you're a dxo photolab user you should watch
this video next it explains how you can achieve the same excellent results as you would with
using dxo pure raw thanks for watching today's video and i hope to see you again in the future