DxO PhotoLab 10 review: excellent, expensive, specialised

RAW image quality is right at the heart of DxO PhotoLab. It uses DxO’s own lab-developed correction profiles to fix lens issues like colour fringing, distortion, vignetting and even global and edge softness. There are now tens of thousands of camera/lens combination profiles with more being added all the time, and these corrections are applied automatically, in the blink of any eye, as soon as images are displayed. Other programs offer lens corrections, but not like this.

Of course there’s more. DxO has also developed its own DeepPRIME noise reduction process that can be applied optionally to high-ISO images. Processing takes a few seconds but produces a level of detail and clarity that’s often quite staggering. Other programs offer AI noise reduction too, but DxO’s is still the gold standard.

With PhotoLab 10, DxO has added another key feature for ultimate RAW quality – AI noise reduction. This was first introduce in DxO PureRAW 6, so it’s probably logical to find it added here too. It finds and removes sensor dust spots in a single process so that you don’t have to spend time cloning out dust spots manually.

One top of all of this, PhotoLab 10 is a powerful photo editing tool with both global and local adjustments. The local adjustments get special attention in this release, with new AI masking options, depth masking, a new Control Brush tool and the ability to combine AI masks with DxO’s own selective U-Point masking technology.

Is there anything PhotoLab doesn’t do? Well, yes. It does have basic image browsing tools, but it doesn’t have the powerful searching and organisng tools of Lightroom or Capture One. It also offers just a handful of preset image effects too, so if you’re into vintage, retro, and black and white image effects, you’re probably going to need the DxO Nik Collection. This is sold separately, though there are buttons in PhotoLab 10 to send images directly to these plug-ins when it’s installed.

PhotoLab doesn’t do layered composite images either. Traditionally this would be the preserve of Photoshop – another expense – but in PhotoLab 10 DxO has added a button to send images directly to Affinity (now owned by Canva) for this kind of work.

So keep in mind who DxO PhotoLab is designed for. It’s for people who want the ultimate in quality from their RAW files (and their camera gear) with the ability to carry out precise adjustments both to the image as a whole and to selected objects and areas. It’s for people who aren’t that bothered about sophisticated image cataloguing tools and are happy to look elsewhere for stylised image effects.

DxO PhotoLab 10 usability

PhotoLab 10 has two main modes: the PhotoLibrary window, where you do all your image browsing and organising, and the Customise window, where you do your editing. Why not ‘Organise’ and ‘Edit’? Oh well.

The PhotoLibrary panel is named rather grandly but is basic compared to Lightroom Classic. Essentially, it’s a folder/file browser with some filtering options. There is a search tool which finds matching data types as you type, such as camera name, lens, ISO setting or keywords, but this appears to index every folder you’ve visited – there’s no way to ‘contain’ your searches to a specific drive or directory or set of folders. You can also set up Projects (albums, essentially) using a panel below the folder list that’s easily overlooked. This lets you create a hierarchy of ‘virtual’ collections of images that can span many different folders.

PhotoLab fans can be quite vocal in their support for the simplified folder-based filing system used here. It’s not for me, though. I would need a lot more convincing to swap from Lightroom Classic or Capture One to this way of working. If DxO wants to tempt new users, I’d start here, not spend every more time and resources on AI masking tools, no matter how good.

The main Customize window is where all the editing work is done. PhotoLab has quite a lot of adjustment palettes, organised into tabs for exposure, colour, geometric adjustments and more. You’ll will soon learn where to find the tools you need, but you don’t get a simplified single-column tool ‘stack’ like Lightrooms. 

Yes, I am comparing PhotoLab to Lightroom a lot, but if DxO wants users to switch then these things are important. Of course, it may be happy to court users who don’t like the way Lightroom (or Adobe) does things, in which case these comparisons hardly matter.

The new masking tools inevitably add a little more depth to a set of masking options that’s already pretty deep. However, DxO has made the new depth maps quick and simple to understand, the Control Brush makes sense when you think of it as a control point that you can brush on manually but still has an eyedropper for selecting the key tonal values for the mask, and the way people are identified and separated and their features listed for masking is much faster and more intuitive than you might expect from descriptions. It works in the same way as Lightroom’s people masking, which Adobe can probably take as a compliment.

The one annoyance, probably unavoidable, is that the DeepPRIME process can’ be displayed live on the full image, only a preview window. It’s really a process designed to be applied when the image is exported.

DxO PhotoLab 10 results

I’ve said it so many times that people are probably sick of hearing it, bit DxO’s lens corrections, RAW processing and AI denoising are as good as it gets. Add in the new AI dust removal feature, and you can now get images that are cleaner, sharper and straighter than you might ever have imagined. With older, noiser cameras or cheaper ‘consumer’ lenses, the transformations can be even more spectacular.

The new masking options are impressive too. But maybe DxO has been dazzled by recent AI masking and feels it needs to keep up, and maybe existing users who aren’t into this kind of detailed manipulation will feel that this update is too heavily skewed in a direction that doesn’t appeal to them.

But these masking tools do work well. I’m especially impressed by the Depth Mask option. I don’t usually have a lot of time for depth masking, but here it works brilliantly. The AI does a great job of interpreting depth and distance, producing feathered masks that blend different distance ranges really well. You just use the eyedropper to select your ‘distance’ and then adjust sliding distance markers to refine this distance selection.

The Control Brush is an interesting new option that’s definitely worth exploring. It is to brush tools what Control Lines are to gradient masks, adding an eyedropper tool to select the base tone/colour that you want the mask to be based on.

I do quite like the new Color Grading panel too, though while combining three colour wheels (shadows, midtones, highlights) into one does save space, I’m not sure it’s exactly a game changer. It’s probably about time PhotoLab supported colour grading anyway, to be fair.

DxO PhotoLab 10 value for money

PhotoLab 10 is a pretty expensive piece of software at $249.99 / £229.99 for a new license, or $129.99 / £114.99 if you’re upgrading from PhotoLab 8 or 9. You can also download a free 30-day trial.

That new license price is on a par with a full year’s subscription to the Adobe Photography Plan, which comes with both versions of Lightroom, Photoshop and 1TB cloud storage. DxO is quick to point out that this is a perpectual license, so you can pay once and use it forever, but I’m not convinced by that. You can use it forever, but that doesn’t mean it will be useful forever. Sooner or later, an OS update will render it incompatible, or you’ll get new camera gear that isn’t supported, or rival programs will move on so far ahead that you feel you have to move with them. 

DxO does at least offer a two-year upgrade window, so that although PhotoLab is updated annually, you do qualify for the upgrade price even if you skip a version.

PhotoLab 10 is the ultimate tool for RAW-shooting perfectionists and photographers who want to refine and perfect their images to the nth degree. It does that brilliantly. But it’s for a specialised audience that wouldn’t be happy with anything less, and its rather basic image cataloguing and limited effects presets mean it’s not for everyone. You can extend its capabilities with DxO FilmPack and DxO ViewPoint, but this means spending more again.

If you’re looking for software to augment your current workflow not replace it, then I would recommend DxO PureRAW 6 for pre-processing RAW files ahead of importing into Lightroom or Capture One or indeed any other editor, and DxO Nik Collection 9 for a huge array of creative image effects you can use alongside your existing organising and editing software.