DxO PureRAW 3 - £115/$129 (£69/$79 upgrade)

If your raw files look disappointing then you've been using the wrong software

- Rod Lawton

While many swear by Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom, in terms of raw processing they aren’t actually the best around. Adobe’s raw engine does a good job with colour profiles, AI masking, tonal adjustments and basic lens corrections, but it isn’t the best software for noise reduction. Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop may be amongst the best photo editing software applications you can get, but they aren’t perfect, especially for editing raw files.

But this is PureRAW 3’s speciality. Its lens correction profiles tackle global lens sharpness issues but also edge softness, all through DxO’s correction profiles that have been developed in-house for tens of thousands of camera-lens combinations. And with DeepPRIME XD, it uses AI-powered noise reduction and detail enhancement to produce spectacular results. The worse the original raw file, the more dramatic the transformation.

However, there are no editing tools in PureRAW 3. For that, you can use your regular software, such as Lightroom. PureRAW 3 is simply a batch-processing tool for producing higher-quality raw files. DxO claims DeepPRIME XD can produce up to 2.5 stops of improvement in noise control, but everything we’ve seen makes that look like a pretty conservative claim.