I use LR for organizing and editing and the DxO PureRAW4 plugin for denoising and/or distortion correction.
I can’t get used to DxO PL not showing what you’re working on, the loupe view in the latest PL is an improvement over the previous versions, but still unusable for my workflow. Apart from that, the ‘AI’ masking in LR can be used an understood and used in minutes, the ‘control points’ in DxO still baffle me, even after hours of tutorials and condescending forum advice (the Adobe forums are even more toxic).
For the price, DxO pretends to be a perpetual license, but the yearly updates require a complete new purchase and some features requires additional expansions with crap you don’t need, like the nik collection. It’s like being at the car dealership
All my complaining aside, the denoising, debayering, lens corrections and viewpoint corrections DxO does are the best I’ve seen, which is why I keep my eye on pureraw and viewpoint updates!
The 'AI' object removal in LR also has a tendency to replace the object with something it considers similar instead of removing it. In a few of the summer vacation shots I wanted to clone out other people standing in the surf, it replaced them with what I'll call "slightly melted garden gnome clowns" that heavily triggered my coulrophobia. I worked around that by using the clone tool first and then the 'AI' tool on top. That gave me realistic looking waves again. I wish it Adobe would make their 'AI' a bit more intelligent and less artificial.
The 'AI' object removal in LR also has a tendency to replace the object with something it considers similar instead of removing it. In a few of the summer vacation shots I wanted to clone out other people standing in the surf, it replaced them with what I'll call "slightly melted garden gnome clowns" that heavily triggered my coulrophobia. I worked around that by using the clone tool first and then the 'AI' tool on top. That gave me realistic looking waves again. I wish it Adobe would make their 'AI' a bit more intelligent and less artificial.
The advice on the internet is all over the place as well: 'mask whole the object', 'mask in sections', 'keep wide margin', 'keep a small margin', et cetera.
I need to give PhotoAI a try again, I didn't like 3.2, too much variation in the results for different images when using the same settings. Not something I look forward to when coming home with a gazillion images because precapture + 30fps is so darn fun to use
PhotoAI 3.3 has got rid of the pink colour cast when opening the R5 Mk II CR3 raw files. But you still cannot use PhotoAI to process R5 Mk II raw files because there is bug that prevents you from saving the output as a DNG file. A support request to fix this bug is open for 4+ weeks.
I haven't run across anything in DxO PL that requires nik. Overall, my experience has been that they do a good job with the 'perpetual' nature of their licensing, and it's gotten better. For example, they used to have a cutoff date of the version upgrade release for supporting new cameras. But that changed recently, so for example even though the R5II launched just before PL7, they extended support for the R5II back to PL6. As long as your camera body is supported by the software, all new lenses are also supported.For the price, DxO pretends to be a perpetual license, but the yearly updates require a complete new purchase and some features requires additional expansions with crap you don’t need, like the nik collection. It’s like being at the car dealership
Take a look at FastRawViewer.com it's around $30 for a perpetual license and will render ~6 raw images/sec for me (R3 24MP). That's fast enough that I'm the limiting factor.
