DxO PhotoLab 8 Elite

DXO's flagship editor gets an upgrade but, asks Rod Lawton, are the results worth it?

- Rod Lawton

PhotoLab 8 Elite is the latest version of DxO's flagship photo-editing software. (There's a less powerful Essentials edition for £129/$139.) It's an interesting alternative to Lightroom and Capture One, with a little less emphasis on photo-organising and cataloguing tools and a lot more on high-quality RAW processing.

In fact, if you shoot RAW files to get the best possible quality from your camera, PhotoLab needs to be considered as among the best photo-editing software applications for the job.

PhotoLab 8's key features include DxO's proprietary DeepPRIME noise-reduction and detail-enhancement process, which can achieve amazing results with high-ISO images; and its lab-derived lens-correction profiles, which don't just correct distortion, corner shading and chromatic aberration, but also the progressive loss of sharpness towards the edges of the frame shown by most lenses.

PhotoLab 8 also has powerful local adjustment tools and masking options. These don't follow the current trend towards AI subject recognition, but instead use DXO's own U-point masking technology, which is a very different, but powerful alternative.

DxO PhotoLab appears to be on an annual upgrade cycle, so the burning question is what's new in PhotoLab 8 to make it worth upgrading to? PhotoLab 8 now comes with an improved DeepPRIME XD2s denoising process.