DxO PureRAW 6 review

All RAW processors are different. Lightroom and Photoshop use the Adobe Camera Raw processing engine, Capture One uses its own and other photo-editing applications have their own RAW processing setups. The same goes for lens correction profiles. But what if you could get the best of both worlds – DxO’s stellar lens corrections and denoising, but still in the RAW format for maximum flexibility?

That’s what PureRAW 6 does. It can be used to generate fully corrected and denoised JPEG images, if that’s what you want, but its real strength is its DNG output. It uses a specialised part-processed RAW format that other programs can open and edit as a regular RAW file, but instead of doing their own demosaicing and lens corrections, they’ve already been done by PureRAW.

This is basically all that PureRAW does. It pre-processes RAW files ready for use in other programs. And for this to make any sense, it has to do a much better job than your regular software.

Leaving the DeepPRIME denoising out of this for the moment, let’s just look at DxO’s lens corrections. These don’t just stop at chromatic aberration, distortion and corner shading correction, but add in global lens sharpening and edge sharpening based on each lens’s characteristics as tested in DxO’s labs, and you get images which are not just optically corrected but sharper too.

It does! Sometimes the improvement is subtle, sometimes it’s spectacular. With full frame cameras and pro lenses you may not see much difference, but with smaller sensors and ‘consumer’ lenses you certainly will – and if you like older cameras or you have a stock of RAW files going back many years, PureRAW’s corrections can be genuinely transformative, giving your old gear (or old images) new life.

That’s part of the story. The other part is DxO’s DeepPrime 3 denoising. This is spectacularly effective at reducing or eliminating noise in high-ISO RAW files while enhancing or revealing fine image detail you might not even have realized was there. There’s not much to be gained at low ISOs, but at high ISOs, and especially with smaller sensors and older cameras, the results can be just jaw-dropping.

There has in the past been a downside to all this. The DNG files that PureRAW produced were typically 3-4 times larger than the original RAW files. That’s not a problem for occasional use, but if you put all your RAW files through PureRAW as a matter of routine, it really eats up your storage – which is bad news at a time when AI datacenters are stealing all our storage!

But PureRAW 6 introduces a new ‘high fidelity’ compressed DNG format that produces files no larger than the original RAWs and often a good deal smaller, and with no quality loss that I’ve been able to see so far.

This is big news! It means it’s now perfectly practical to run all your RAW files through PureRAW before you do anything else with them. I shoot a lot with Micro Four Thirds cameras, often at medium-high ISOs, so this is now a no-brainer.

There’s something else. PureRAW 6 now incorporates AI dust removal. I don’t really need it for my Micro Four Thirds gear which has very effective SSWF dust removal in camera, but for my full frame Sony Alpha gear it’s a must-have, as these sensors attract dust like you wouldn’t believe.

PureRAW 6 isn’t cheap, and if you use Lightroom you’ve already got AI denoising built in (it’s not as good, IMHO, and neither are the lens corrections). Other programs have similar correction and denoising tools.

However, nothing else I’ve tried approaches the quality of PureRAW 6’s output. It’s easy to slot into your workflow – use it right at the start, or launch it as needed from within Lightroom Classic – and now it can fix your dust spots too. The new compressed DNG format seals it – PureRAW 6 is, for me, a must-have for high ISOs, older sensors and consumer-grade lenses. The difference it makes is like buying new gear.