DxO PureRAW 5 review

Pros

+ Superb denoising and detail enhancement
+ Local adjustments for denoising and sharpening
+ X-Trans support (beta) with new XD3 process
+ Time-saving export presets

Cons

– X-Trans 5 images revert to DeepPRIME XD
– Hard to see the improvement in DeepPRIME XD3
– Masks can shift sideways with some camera/lens combinations

What is DxO PureRAW 5?

DxO’s lab-derived lens corrections are just about the best on the market, combining not just distortion correction, chromatic aberration correction and corner shading correction, but adding in global lens softness compensation and edge softness correction too. 

At the same time, DxO’s AI-powered DeepPRIME denoising process leads the field, in my opinion. Other applications can achieve the same level of noise reduction but I haven’t yet found one that can match DxO’s high-ISO detail rendition and reconstruction.

These two features put DxO’s raw processing ahead of all the rest, leaving just one problem – are you then going to have to switch to a new photo editor and editing workflow to exploit them?

No, you’re not.

That’s because PureRAW 5 takes these key attributes of DxO’s RAW processing and bundles them together in a software tool designed to work alongside your existing software tools rather than attempting to replace them.

Essentially, it’s a kind of batch processor for RAW files, applying DxO’s lens corrections and denoising process to output Linear DNG files, which are like part-processed RAWs. They can still be edited as regular RAW files in Lightroom and other programs, with all their RAW dynamic range and color data intact, but with DxO’s processing already applied.

PureRAW 5 doesn’t just generate Linear DNG RAW files. It can also output ready-to-share JPEG and TIFF images, and here you can opt to include DxO’s Smart Lighting process to balance up the shadows and highlights and maximise the dynamic range.

It’s PureRAW’s RAW output, though, that is going to be most useful to photographers aiming to get the maximum possible image quality from their RAW files, and PureRAW 5 has another trick here – it integrates directly with Lightroom Classic, so that if you decide an image needs the DxO treatment, you can ‘round-trip’ it to PureRAW from within Lightroom, whereupon the processed DNG file is automatically re-imported to your Lightroom catalog.

What about any edits you’ve already applied to the original RAW file in Lightroom? These are automatically applied to the imported DNG file. Smart.

What’s new in DxO PureRAW 5?

DxO is constantly developing its DeepPRIME denoising process, and PureRAW 5 brings the latest version, DeepPRIME XD3 (XD stands for eXtra Detail). This new version is better than ever, now correcting what DxO calls ‘residual chromatic shifts at a pixel level’.

There’s new DeepPRIME support for X-Trans cameras, too. The unique color filter array of Fujifilm’s X-Trans sensors once meant they weren’t supported at all by DxO’s RAW processing engine, but the company has made huge strides and its X-Trans support is now just half a step behind. PureRAW 5 now offers DeepPRIME XD3 processing for X-Trans in beta form, though if you own one of the latest X-Trans 5 sensor cameras, it will revert to the earlier DeepPRIME process.

In PureRAW 5, DxO has also added local adjustments, so that you can mask different areas of an image and apply specific sharpening and noise reduction settings to those areas. Will you actually want to get that deep into selective edits in a program designed simply for RAW processing? Well, the feature is there if you need it.

DxO has also streamlined the PureRAW interface to make it slicker and more efficient to use – though the old version was hardly complicated. The company has also added custom export presets, and these do look genuinely useful because you can create presets for different cameras (processing settings) and workflows (export formats, renaming, where images are saved).

DxO PureRAW 5 interface and usability

PureRAW 5 can be used either as a standalone batch processing tool for processing whole folders full of images at a time, or as a Lightroom Classic add-on for use when necessary on specific images.

In standalone mode, all you need to do is drag a folder full of images on to the PureRAW application window and they will be displayed as thumbnails in its ‘Lightbox’. It can take a little while for PureRAW to  render these images, especially if you want to process hundreds at a time, and it’s slower still if you want to use its new ‘tiled’ display, where it has to render all the thumbnails before it can fit them to its grid and in my tests never quite finished the job properly.

From here, you can use the Process with Preview option to see the effects of the processing settings on individual images, or the Process option to simply process the whole lot without any further ado.

When you add images to the Lightbox, PureRAW will check the EXIF data and ask you to confirm the camera/lens model so that it can match up the correct profile. Profiles weren’t always applied correctly in the first v5.0.0 release, so make sure you install the v5.0.1 update.

Talking of problems, I did run into another. With some images, the local adjustment masking worked just fine, but with others, the mask would be displaced to the right as soon as I stopped painting the mask and released the mouse. This seemed to happen with specific camera/lens profiles, while others were unaffected. Odd.

DxO PureRAW 5 results

It’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the results are spectacularly good. DxO’s processing can transform the results from mediocre lenses, older cameras and high ISO settings to a degree you wouldn’t have thought possible. I have a Fujifilm X30 with a modest 1/2.3-inch sensor which is a lovely camera but technically well past its best – but PureRAW 5 removes all the noise and extracts a level of detail that is just extraordinary. Is the AI making it up? I’m not sure I care – it looks real, and it looks amazing.

PureRAW 5 can work the same kind of magic on any camera – I have some interiors shot at ISO 12800 on a Canon EOS R8 (no IBIS, hence the high ISO) and it makes them look as if they were shot at ISO 200. Amazing.

Very occasionally, the noise reduction can make human faces look a bit smudgy and odd, but only rarely and generally with older, noisier cameras, and sometimes it can guess at patterns and textures which aren’t quite right. Mostly, though, the results are extraordinary.

Now the bad news. I’m sure if I looked long enough and hard enough at dozens of images I might start to see the difference between the DeepPRIME XD3 and previous DeepPRIME XD2 results, but right now, they look pretty much the same to me.

I’m also a bit concerned about the size of DxO’s Linear DNG files. They are bound to be larger than the RAW files they’re based on because they contain demosaiced image data and full color information for each pixel (RAW files don’t), but at 3-4 times the size they do take up a lot of disk space. If you’re tempted to process all your RAW files with PureRAW, you’re quickly going to come up against disk space limits.

If DxO could fix one thing, I wish it could fix this. It can’t be impossible, because Lightroom’s Enhance feature, which also produces Linear DNG files, produces image files less than twice the size of the original, presumably because Adobe has found a more efficient file compression format (recently, I believe).

So while PureRAW 5’s results are clearly superior to Lightroom Enhance, the size of its output files could make the Adobe alternative more attractive. It’s not as good, but it might be good enough.

DxO PureRAW 5 verdict

DxO has found a way to make some useful improvements to PureRAW for what has now settled down, it seems, to an annual update cycle. I like the new interface, I especially like the new custom export presets, and while I don’t think I will use the local adjustments very much, they are an interesting idea. I also like the continued evolution of the DeepPRIME process, although I can’t help feeling the rate of change has slowed and the improvements in successive versions are becoming harder to spot.

If you already use PureRAW 4, I’d suggest checking the trial version of PureRAW 5 before definitely deciding to upgrade. The upgrade price is $79.99/£69.99, so it’s cheaper than the full price of $119.99/£109.99 but still a significant outlay. The biggest benefit will be for Fujifilm shooters, but others might not feel DeepPRIME XD3 is a big enough step forward to be worth it.

The other thing is that I’ve been using PureRAW right from version 1. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind about how good it is. But the longer I keep using it, the more my drive is filling up with its big Linear DNG files. HD storage is cheap, you might say, but I use SSDs these days as, I suspect, most photographers do – and SSDs are most definitely not cheap.