DxO ViewPoint 6 review

DxO ViewPoint 6 is designed to offer the ultimate precision and control over perspective and distortion, particularly with wide-angle lenses. There is some overlap with other image editing software, much of which can also apply lens corrrections and perspective correction too.

Where ViewPoint goes further is its local perspective adjustments, using cells and nodes, which allow you to correct only those objects and areas that need it and not the whole image, so that – potentially – you don’t have to lose as much of the image to cropping.

ViewPoint also corrects a thing called volume deformation. You’ve probably seen this hundreds of times without realizing it has a name. It’s where objects near the edges of the frame in wide-angle shots appear unnaturally stretched. It’s most obvious with human figures and faces. It’s practically inevitable with wide-angle lenses just because of the way they project the world around you on to a flat plane. Well, ViewPoint fixes this where other programs don’t even try.

ViewPoint has another trick, which actually seems slightly at odds with its otherwise clinically precise approach – it can replicate a tilt-shift ‘miniature’ effect, making scenes shot from a high viewpoint look like tiny models. It’s a visual trick that uses the shooting angle and progressive blur (shallow depth of field) effects to convince the viewer’s eyes that they’re looking at a close up of a model scene.

So far so good. But how easy is it to use ViewPoint 6’s special tools and, more to the point, how often might you need them?

DxO ViewPoint 6 usability

DxO ViewPoint 6 can be used as a standalone program, as a plug-in for Lightroom Classic, Photoshop and Capture One, or within DxO PhotoLab 10, where it’s integrated into the Geometry panel and the top toolbar, and its tools can be used as part of PhotoLab’s non-destructive editing workflow.

• If you’re not seeing the ViewPoint 6 tools in PhotoLab 10, check your version number. DxO quickly released a 10.2 update to fix this issue.

It’s in standalone mode that ViewPoint 6 has taken a big step forward. Now that it can edit RAW files directly, it’s no longer reliant on ‘host’ programs to do the RAW processing first. In the past, you could edit JPEG images directly if they were the original image straight from the camera and not edited (or it would ask you to locate the orginal), but now you can just get to work directly on your RAW files. It will check the EXIF data and find matching lens correction profiles as required.

This editing process is non-destructive, too. All your changes are saved as ‘sidecar’ files alongside your original RAW files, so you can go back and make changes later on if you need to. Will this clash with any sidecar files created by DxO PhotoLab? DxO has thought of this and implemented a different file format.

But let’s just think about this. If you do have DxO PhotoLabe 10, ViewPoint 6’s tools will be integrated into the Geometry panel, so it would be much better to make your ViewPoint adjustments here rather than in ViewPoint’s standalone mode, right?

Also, when you’ve made your edits in ViewPoint 6and want to carry out further editing in other programs, your only options are JPEG or TIFF images, where you’d probably prefer to be working on RAW files. It’s a shame ViewPoint 6 can’t export images in DxO’s clever compressed DNG format.

Back to usability. How easy is ViewPoint 6 to use? On a superficial level, very easy. You can apply DxO’s lens corrections with a single click, you can apply global perspective corrections with a single click and it’s easy to fix volumetric deformation with a single click – remember, no other program event attempts this.

But it’s when you try to apply local perspective adjustments that things start to become a little trickier, and for two reasons.

The first, and least serious, is that once you start messing with nodes, and subdividing nodes, and moving vs rotating vs scaling, and manual node/cell selections and AI object selections… it all gets very granular and distinctly time-consuming. Like tipping out a spoonful of granulated sugar and pushing the little grains of sugar about. That kind of granular. 

The second reason is more of a question. How many images do you have that need this?

DxO ViewPoint 6 results

ViewPoint 6 does an excellent job of lens corrections and global perspective corrections. There’s no doubt about that. But other programs like Lightroom and Capture One do too. Maybe not quite as well, but often, for many photographers, quite well enough.

What they don’t have is ViewPoint’s volume deformation correction, which is both unique and valuable, or its local perspective corrections, which are also unique but maybe [apologies to fans] not as useful.

Now I’m happy to accept that there may be situations outside of the way I personally take photographs and the subjects I shoot where this kind of granular control becomes important. I hope so. Otherwise, DxO is, well, wasting its time.

The fact is, I had the devil of a time finding images – any images – that would definitely benefit from local perspective adjustments. All of my images with perspective issues would benefit from global perspective adjustments, but I found very few where I could demonstrate any useful benefits from local adjustments vs global ones. Maybe that’s just me and the way I shoot.

I did struggle with another issue with local perspective adjustments. They need to blend with their surroundings in a realistic way that doesn’t introduce new localized twisting and bending distortions, You can probably do this with careful node adjusments, tweaks to the Propagation slider, subdividing nodes and more, but it all takes time and effort, and even then it can be impossible to reconcile adjustments where there are straight lines and patterns around the object you’re adjusting. With skies and vegetation, you’ll be fine.

I’ll be honest. I didn’t enjoy using ReShape Fusion, had to spend some time getting the results to look right and struggled to find images where it made them better. You might say I needed to spend more time with the tools; I would say most photographers don’t have this kind of time.

DxO ViewPoint 6 value for money

DxO ViewPoint 6 costs $129.99 / €119.99 / £109.99 for a new license or $84.99 / €74.99 / £69.99 as an upgrade from ViewPoint 5 and is available now from the DxO online shop.

New customers can also save 15% with this exclusive LAP15 discount code at the checkout and, as ever, DxO is offering a 30-day free trial to help you make your mind up, available from https://www.dxo.com/dxo-viewpoint/download.

However, I do think this is a lot of money for a very specialized tool that you may get full value from if you are a specialist in wide-angle photography with time to spare to perfect individual images, and a tool which overlaps distortion and perspective tools you probably already have, and which may themselves do everything you need.