DxO PureRAW 3 VS PureRAW 2, should you upgrade and is it worth it?

[@nadjauebach9381]

Another great video, thank you for showing the comparison between the two versions. Very helpful!

[@kieranhayesphotography]

Thank you :-) and you're very welcome.

[@kieranhayesphotography]

Don't just take my word for it, check it out for yourself and get a 30 day free trial of PureRAW 3 here... tidd.ly/3FO0qEz

[@martinlennon4673]

Great review, Martin.

[@kieranhayesphotography]

Thanks a lot Martin.

[@Hsukhaybir]

That software does good job .. But tbh, i noticed they’re trying to fool the users at the need with ( before and after ) comparison .. they make the before looks way worse than how it actually is I open my image and see it it’s not that worse! .. with every image, also I think it’s not fair to ask such an expensive price to just upgrade .. I use it only a few times a month and ask for 80$ to just get little sharper ? No sorry .. photoshop and Lightroom AI noise reduction are already improving 👋

[@kieranhayesphotography]

Very true, I see that also. The only thing is the other image enhancing software companies are just as bad. The before image is always over done. In fairness Lightrooms DeNoise AI is incredible. I use Pure Raw 3 as a plugin for Lightroom so you don't actually see the before after comparison you just enable PR3 and it works away on the photo to sharpen it and add great image distortion correction and noise reduction too of course. It's not cheap but it does an amazing job when you need it.

[@cdmikelis]

My own testing resulted: DxO 3 is not and upgrade in IQ, but functionality rather.- It is soon obvious why they left old process in version 3 and not only new "AI" XD, because it is not always better than old process. Often it is worse. It tries to eliminate ALL noise and artificially sharpen stuff. The XD version is often weird and unnatural, it gives ton of artefacts on faces and stuff. It is often better to leave it at standard. DxO is not on level of detail recreation of Topaz yet, but it is better at integrating recreated details with other parts of image - no visible lines, so less obvious manipulation of faces. With added controls, DxO PureRAW 3 is better than previous version 2. For one major reason - SHARPENING can be turned off! DxO is not good at sharpening!! CaptureOne have way better sharpening and more controlled and is "non destructive". DxO always make ugly halo effect around edges and oversharpen image where there is no need for sharpening. It has one sharpening level for whole frame, not selective. It ruins thiny details like hair, so they start to "bloom" out from while borders around and small colorfull details lost the color due to same black lines around edges - plain old edge or contrast sharpening. Sucks! I do not use sharpen at all because it does not trake lens softness into account. The name "lens softness" is misleading and false!" Capture one has lens profiles that actually take measured lens softness into account and ONLY apply extra sharpening at the edges or where lens get softer. It is shame DxO that has better lens profiles, that actually recreate image better, did not use that data for sharpening, too. I have one really white rectilinear lens, that is quite stretched on edges and unusable for most details on outer 3th of image. While CaptureOne fix CA and purple fringing perfectly, also adds sharpening only to those edges, it does not realign RGB channels to improve definition. DxO does that and CA is fixed better than in C1, with stretching channels to match better so edges actually get better definition than before. Thankfully I can later add only sharpness to edges in C1, but for a lot of lenses I do not have profile in C1. DxO have aggressive sharpening that would be good at those edges. Solution is to process one image WITH and one WITHOUT sharpening and than combine that in post production. Again, time consuming. DxO having all the measurements of lenses, they SHOULD take that into account when sharpening. And they are years behind in sharpening to Topaz or Capture one (AI vs standard).

[@kieranhayesphotography]

Completely agree with alot of what you are saying. The one thing DXO have said in my meetings with them is that the other models suit specific images better hence why they left them there as an option. They advise you try the different options and see which one suits your image best. My hope is one of these days the AI will be trained well enough to correctly detect which model to use on which type of image to create more accurate denoising. It's all still a work in progress but it is going in the right direction. Looking forward to the future holds for photography 👍

[@cdmikelis]

Exactly @@kieranhayesphotography, it had to be tried several times. In this regard, probably using DxO full package is much more efficient. The PureRaw main attraction is to leave it at some setting and than let it go over 1000's of images (from event). Version 3 allow to group images by ISO. Indeed "regular" DeepPrime is better when faces are small compared to noise and is better to leave little noise and softer face, than try to recreate it fully and make artefacts. But I found out that I just loose too much time with thinking in advance which version will suit better and fiddling with multiple versions per image. It is than better to just use slower image-to-image approach in some other software and just decide image-per-image. someday AI will be trained enough ... IN fact it is already trained to the useful state. Is still prefer DxO over LR or other software, for being fast and automated. I just leave sharpening off, since I can sharpen better later per need. For particular face recreation, also there is dedicated software. For the most part, DxO is great. For those hard images automation is not good anyway.

[@seymourecarnage]

I did a video on LRC vs PR2 and then more recently a video on C1 vs PR3. I used the same files in each (Fuji RAWs), and the same processing modes, and 2 in many cases delivered a better output than 3, which was really surprising. 3 overprocessed and oversmoothed a few of my files, and caused ghosting/aberration in areas of high contrast and detail. I was pretty disappointed. There was a 3.1 update a couple of days ago but I haven't had a change to see if it made any changes to the outputs. It looks like it just was bug fixes and additional lens support. kzbin.info/www/bejne/npvPmXeood93bKc

[@kieranhayesphotography]

Hi and thanks for that, that's interesting to know. It might have something to do with the Fuji format. I ha ent seen that at all with my Nikon Raw files. Apologies for the late reply I am away in Iceland for a few weeks and my connection isn't great.

[@seymourecarnage]

@@kieranhayesphotography No worries. Enjoy Iceland! Also, I'm shocked to say that the Lightroom Classic update from a couple days ago that added the X-Trans Denoise function is absolutely upstaging PureRAW in my testing. It's shocking how good it is. I'll have a video out soon about it, but in the mean time if you use LRC you owe to yourself to try it and see.

[@davepastern]

@@seymourecarnage X-Trans denoise?

[@seymourecarnage]

@@davepastern Yes, all the tests were done on X-Trans files. Specifically from X-Trans 3 sensors.