Dxo OPTICS PRO V4.2 User Manual

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

DxO Optics Pro V4.2

Reference Manual

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

Contents

Introduction 4 Introducing DxO Optics Pro V4

Chapter 1 6 A typical image enhancement session from A to Z

Selecting images to create a project Organizing your project Enhancing the images in your project Processing a batch of images Viewing the results! Common actions Note for users of previous versions

Chapter 2 9 Select your photos from various sources

The thumbnails and their buttons

Star-ranking Adding images Fully automatic operation

Chapter 3 12 Organize your images on an electronic light-table

The big picture

Adapt your workspace

Chapter 4 14 Enhance your images using DxO Optics Pro Tools Corrections Palette

Guided or Expert? Eight corrections palettes

Chapter 5 18 Process as many images as you want with just

one click

Process the stars Define output formats

Chapter 6 20 View the results of your work (with a little help from DxO)

Chapter 7 21 How to go further

Your workflow

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

Chapter 8 22 DxO Optics Pro Menus

Chapter 9 28 Using Auto, Guided and Expert modes

Chapter 10 31 Generic Tools

Chapter 11 34 DxO Optics Tools

Chapter 12 40 Sharpness Tools

Chapter 13 43 DxO Noise Tools

Chapter 14 45 White Balance and Exposure

Chapter 15 49 DxO Color Tools

Chapter 16 55 DxO Lighting Tools

Chapter 17 58 Geometry Tools

Chapter 18 63 Stacking, ranking and Output Formats

Chapter 19 67 DxO Optics Pro for Photoshop

Copyrights, Trademarks and Registered marks are properties of their respective owners, which may include, but are not limited to, Nikon, Canon, Kodak, Fuji, Sony and others.

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

Introduction

Welcome to the exciting world of DxO Optics Pro digital image enhancement!

This powerful, groundbreaking software is going to improve the quality of your digital images in a way you would never have believed possible.

DxO Optics Pro’s precise, calibrated corrections are based on unique algorithms derived from actual measurements made on real camera bodies and lenses. Thousands of test measurements are made on each body and lens combination, with every permutation of shooting parameters.

This is why the whole DxO Optics Pro system operates using what are called ‘Correction Modules’, each unique and specific to a particular body / lens combination; for this reason, you need to make sure you have the right module(s) for the bodies and/or lenses you use. All this means that DxO Optics Pro produces extremely accurate actual corrections of measured phenomena, instead of just subjective (and often impossibly time-consuming) manual approximations.

In addition, this new version 4 of the software also includes a number of corrections that are not camera-specific, so you can make the most of other images too, and some adjustments, going beyond purely correction, that you can perform manually for creative effect.

A simple workflow

The way the DxO Optics Pro workflow is organized is perhaps worth explaining briefly. You start by creating a new ‘project’, which you can name and save, and into which you will assemble the pictures you wish to process at this time. You can then click on the “Process Now” button to start processing the images with DxO automatic presets. Alternatively, you can work on preview images to define your own corrections or adjustments.

And it’s worth underlining that your original image files are left untouched, they are never altered in any way, deleted, or overwritten, so your precious originals are 100% safe at all times!

What makes DxO Optics Pro even more powerful and ergonomic, is that some or all of your chosen settings can be saved as one or more ‘presets’ that can be applied across a whole series of images — but still leaving you the possibility of making further manual adjustments too, of course! Even without the use of any manual settings at all, DxO Optics Pro can process your images fully automatically, for guaranteed improved results every time!

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

You choose between three different working modes: “Auto” is the most straightforward, since you will only use the automatic enhancement settings provided by DxO Optics Pro. “Guided” gives you access to the Enhancement tab, where you can decide which global setting (as “Portrait”, “Landscape”, etc) to use; and “Expert” gives you the possibility of overriding every option of all the corrections performed by DxO Optics Pro. The choice you made at the first launch of the software can be changed anytime in Preferences (Edit Menu).

Upfront in your workflow!

DxO Optics Pro is designed to be at the very beginning of the workflow, at the point images are copied from the card reader or camera, to correct images straight out of your camera. Please note that if your image has been previously processed using other software, or is missing the EXIF data, certain of the DxO corrections will be unavailable.

Please check the on-line FAQ at

www.dxo.com/en/photo/support for the most

recent updates related to this requirement.

DxO Optics Pro strives to leave as much as possible of the metadata (EXIF, MakerNote, IPTC, XMP) untouched. This means that you should be able to use your other image processing/editing software even after the images have been processed by DxO Optics Pro.

DxO Optics Pro automatically rotates the images if you use the autorotate facility of your camera. There is no need for additional software for this particular step.

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

Chapter 1 — A typical image enhancement session

from A to Z

The whole DxO Optics Pro system has been designed to be easy-to-use and efficient in terms of workflow, which is particularly important for busy photographers with a lot of pictures to process. All this will be explained as we go through a typical photo correction ‘session’ a little bit later on, but for now, let’s content ourselves with looking at a few basic ideas.

Selecting images to create a project

In order to make it easy to process large numbers of images, DxO Optics Pro is designed around the idea of a ‘project’ — so the first idea to grasp is that everything starts off by you wish — that are going to be processed. This creates a ‘project’, which if you wish you can save, manage, and re-open later, more or less like any ordinary working file. You do this by ‘adding images’ to the ‘project pane’ of your workspace — and of course, you can always add more images as you go along, or, naturally, remove any you decide you don’t want in your project after all. When you ‘add images’, you are not in fact saving additional copies of your images, but merely recording references to them in a file that keeps track of all the details of your project.

Organizing your project

Once you have set up a ‘project’ with one or more images to be processed, you can sort through and organize these images, if necessary prioritizing the order in which they will be processed (can be important for large batches!). A

preview pane’ acts as a sort of ‘light table’ where you can compare your

‘ images, perhaps to choose the best or group them in related ‘stacks’.

Enhancing the images in your project

Those simple but important preliminaries over, you can now get down to the real process of correcting your pictures! Often, it will be enough just to click on ‘Process Now’ and let DxO Optics Pro take care of everything painlessly and automatically — this is the quickest and simplest way to start enhancing your pictures! However, more advanced users will probably want to take advantage of some or all of DxO Optics Pro’s sophisticated adjustment possibilities, and/or make use of the time-saving ‘presets’ facilities.

Processing a batch of images

As soon as you are satisfied with the presets and settings you have applied to your selected images, you can move on to

loading up a batch of images — as many or as few as

processing them, with reassuring

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

feedback from the application to keep you continually informed as to progress. Once underway, this processing stage is inherently ‘hands-off’.

Viewing the results!

Naturally enough, once processing is finished, you will want to view your images, and the simple-to-use viewer facility lets you compare your pictures before and after correction. Of course, if you think you could do even better, there’s nothing at all to stop you from re-processing one or more images so that you can apply subtly different settings etc.

We’ve described a logical linear flow for a typical image enhancement session, but of course the software has been designed in such a way that in actual practice you can move around more or less at will between the steps in any order you like — so, for example, at the adjustment stage you might want to go back and add extra images (you can discard images from your project at any step), or you might even want to interrupt processing to go back and make some changes to your settings.

Common actions

There are some actions that are common to many functions within the application, so we’ll describe them here.

Many settings use two different ways of making manual adjustments: there is a slider that you can drag with your mouse. Clicking on either side of a slider will move it in large increments in that direction, and clicking on the + and – buttons at either end of the slider increment or decrement the value by single steps. Alternatively, there’s a data entry box where you can type in an appropriate figure — to do so, you need to select the default value already in the box, delete it, type in your new value, and lastly press ‘Enter’ for it to take effect.

At various points, there are tabs that take you between the different screens of the user interface, and you will also find a number of drop-downs that let you select from lists of options.

Virtually all commands are accessible in three ways, to suit your preferred way of working: you can either select them with the mouse from the traditional drop-down menus at the top of the screen, click on a toolbar icon, or use a keyboard shortcut. Within functions, there are additional context-sensitive mini-toolbars that offer icons appropriate to the task in hand.

Most commands have an explanatory ‘tool tip’ that you can read by hovering the mouse over them.

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

Whenever an image is displayed zoomed bigger than the available window, you can shift the image around in that window just by grabbing it with the ‘hand’ tool, accessible either from the workspace buttons, or by just holding down the space bar while you drag the image around.

As usual, Shift + click allows you to select a range of adjacent items, while Ctrl + click allows you to select multiple items.

Across the top of your screen are drop-down menus that are common across the whole application, though obviously some commands may or may not be available, depending on what you are doing at any given moment. Here are the six menus, and you can click on any of these links for details of the commands under that menu:

File (commands to let you save and manage your session, referred to here as a

‘project’)

Edit (the usual editing commands, plus selection of DxO Optics Pro preferences

and language)

View (commands for the user interface display and file filtering) Workflow (alternative access to the five main session steps, plus start

processing)

Image (options for displaying, and ranking and stacking currently selected

images)

Help (local and online help file, updating, information about DxO Optics Pro

and modules)

Now let’s take a closer look at all this. We’re going to follow the same linear path sketched out above, and by clicking on any of the hot links within the text, you can find out more detailed information about any of the steps. In the next five sections, we’ll be following a logical progression to describe the windows accessed via the five main tabs that appear at the top of your working window — note that only ‘Select’ will be highlighted (i.e. active) until there is at least one image in your project.

Note for users of previous versions

Users of previous versions of DxO Optics Pro will notice that, although the underlying correction principle has not been changed, the introduction of this logical, sequential approach represents a fundamental change to the presentation of your workflow, and has resulted in an even more ergonomic and flexible user interface. You will find it well worth the effort to read through this user guide in order to better appreciate the logic of this new presentation.

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

Chapter 2— Select your photos from various sources

When you first launch the application, the ‘Select’ tab is the only one that is active (highlighted), and your workspace displays a familiar Windows Explorerstyle browser where the top two panes (resizable) allow you to navigate around the files on your disk or accessible externally. As usual, in the righthand file pane you can click on a column header to organize files according to that criterion, and the top bar of the active column header has an

 or  arrow

to select ascending or descending sort order.

Adding images

This initial ‘Select’ stage involves adding the photos you want to process to the project pane, which will remain in the lower part of the window throughout all five stages (from Select to View). As you add images, they are displayed as thumbnails in the bottom pane, which you can resize if necessary to fit in a useful number. Besides using the mouse to drag the dividers to resize these panes, they each have rather discreet  and buttons, to fully open or close a pane, and a  button to regain mouse control.

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

The header strip for the project pane at the bottom of the screen has four buttons at the far right. The first two let you change between viewing as thumbnails or as a classic ‘details’ file list; the last two select respectively

filters you can use to organize your thumbnail display, and which parameters

are displayed in ‘list’ mode. The same buttons appear at the top left of the right-hand ‘files’ pane, where they perform the same functions.

Star-ranking

Also on the project pane, tucked away discreetly at the bottom right, is a small slider, with a button at each end; dragging this to the right, or clicking the right-hand end button, increases the thumbnail size displayed, while dragging it to the left or clicking the left-hand button reduces the size back down to the default. You can choose to ‘

rank’ your images, in order to set their priority for

processing, and also, to save clutter, you can create a ‘stack’ of perhaps related images, or images to which you want to apply the same set of corrections. Both these commands are accessed under the ‘Image’ drop-down menu. In addition, to rank your images for processing priority, you can simply click on the appropriate number of stars displayed above each thumbnail (this works in any of the workspaces, except of course ‘View’).

On the left of the project pane header bar are three more buttons, for managing your project; your project name is displayed just to the right of

them. The button lets you create a new project, the one lets you open

an existing project (provided any exist, of course), and lets you save and/or rename a project.

At the bottom of the right-hand ‘files’ pane are three important buttons — ‘Add images’, ‘Add images and Quick settings’, and ‘Process now’. Note that these buttons will be grayed-out and inactive until you have at least one image selected (in the case of the first two), or at least one image in your project (for the last one).

‘Add images’ will add one or more images selected in the file pane — the usual selection shortcuts apply: Shift + click to select a whole range and Ctrl + click to make multiple selections — into your project. ‘

Add images and Quick settings’ does the same, except that it allows you to choose ‘presets’ to be

associated with particular images.

The simplest way of adding images is just to drag them down from the file pane into the Project pane. This , of course, does not work if you want to associate a preset with the image.

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

The thumbnails and their buttons

To remove one or more images from your project, you simply click on the

orange icon displayed in the centre below each thumbnail; if multiple images are selected, clicking the on any one of them will delete the entire

selection in one go. You can select a group of adjacent images by dragging a ‘rubber-band’ box around them with the mouse, or by holding down the Shift key as you click on the first and last images in a series. Multiple non-adjacent images can be selected by holding down the Ctrl key while you click on them.

The buttons associated with each thumbnail offer the following functions:

to remove the image from the current project

to rotate the image for correct viewing orientation

to create a stack (active on the last-selected image of a multiple selection)

unstacks a stack of images (active when a stack is selected)

Above each image, only visible on mouse-over, are a line of stars  (grayed out at start-up) to indicate the selected ranking of this image for processing — you can click these stars on or off at any time.

In addition to these buttons, certain icons may appear above each thumbnail — follow the link to discover the meanings of these, as they give important information about each image. The color of the frame surrounding the thumbnail also has a significance.

Fully automatic operation

Once you’ve selected and added to your project all the images you want to process, if you have no need to make any manual adjustments to your images, you can simply press the ‘

Process now’ button, and processing will take place

automatically. You will only be asked to intervene manually to input particular data in the event of certain corrections where DxO does not have enough information to process correctly.

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

Chapter 3— Organize your images on an electronic

light-table

Once you have established a Project (either by re-opening an existing one, or by creating a new one), you can use the ‘Organize’ workspace to organize your images and their subsequent processing. If you only have a few images to process, you may be able to skip this stage completely, but it is extremely helpful where your workflow involves much larger numbers of images!

In the ‘Organize’ workspace, the top half of the screen (as always, resizable) is available as a sort of ‘light table’ to display one or more images selected for preview. You can transfer any image to the preview window simply by leftclicking once on the relevant thumbnail. You can select multiple images to preview at the same time, and if for any reason you want to empty the preview screen, you just have to click on a blank area of the thumbnail pane.

The big picture

As soon as there is an image in preview, the with its thumbnail appear at the bottom right of the workspace, along with the current filename on the left. At the left-hand end is a ‘thumbtack’ button that will ‘stick down’ the preview image; this means you can move around between

icon buttons originally associated

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

the thumbnail images in your project pane, without the preview pane continually refreshing.

At the top of the workspace is a header bar. On the left-hand end of it are two buttons: a ‘hand’ tool that lets you grab and drag a zoomed-in preview image so as to be able to examine any part of it; has no effect in ‘Zoom-to-fit’ mode.

Next to it is a magnifying glass tool that lets you to zoom in to any part of the image by successively clicking on it; holding down Shift as you click turns it into a zoom out tool. In all cases, the minimum zoom size is ‘Zoom to fit’ (i.e. determined by the size you have set your preview pane to), and the maximum is 200%.

Alternatively, over on the right-hand side, a drop-down list lets you choose the zoom ratio of the preview image — ‘zoom to fit’ will show you the whole image, resized according to the format of the image and the screen space available, while the various other ratios allow you to examine part of the image in greater detail; as an alternative to selecting from the drop-down menu, you can use the ‘zoom in’ and ‘zoom out’ buttons.

There is also an  button that toggles on/off the display of image EXIF data on the left-hand side of the preview screen.

Adapt your workspace

Also on the right is a little icon you can click to activate a ‘

background brightness’ slider, allowing you to set the background visible around the image

anywhere you like between black and white (at start-up, the default is around 18% gray). This is helpful as a neutral reference when assessing or adjusting the color balance of your images.

If you have a large number of images to process, you will find the ‘Organize’ workspace very useful in allowing you to examine and organize your images in this way, and from the ones you have loaded, make a second, finer selection using the larger ‘light table’; you may well want to reject certain images and discard them from your project,

stack them, and/or assign a processing

priority by ranking your images — later, at the processing stage, you will be able to choose which ranks to process, or not. Both these commands are accessed under the ‘Image’ drop-down menu, or via the thumbnails themselves.

Once you have had this chance to compare and organize your images, you can of course start automatic processing right away (‘Start Processing’ command from ‘Workflow’ menu, or keyboard shortcut Ctrl + R) — but it’s more than likely that you’ll want to move onto the next step, which is to make manual adjustments to some of the correction parameters, or apply some preset corrections to your images.

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

palette

Chapter 4 — Enhance your images using

DxO Optics Pro tools

Tools

Corrections

In the ‘Enhance’ workspace, you will immediately notice that some things have changed. For a start, on the right-hand side of the screen, a palette area appears, which is where you will find all the correction and adjustment tools. We’ll come back to look more closely at that in just a moment, but for the time being, let’s just make a quick tour of the other new items in this workspace.

As always, the familiar project pane occupies the lower part of the window.

The header bar, on the right, carries the same information, zoom, and

background brightness buttons as for the Organize workspace. On the left, the

‘hand’ tool that (lets you grab and drag a zoomed-in preview image so as to be able to examine any part of it) has no effect in ‘Zoom-to-fit’ mode. Next to it is

tool that lets you to zoom in to any part of the image by clicking on it;

a holding down Shift as you click turns it into a zoom out tool. In all cases, the minimum zoom size is ‘Zoom to fit’ (i.e. determined by the size you have set

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

your preview pane to), and the maximum is 200%. Note that some corrections cannot be previsualized with zoom factors below 75% (this is the case for the Chromatic Aberration, DxO Lens softness, DxO Noise and Unsharp Mask corrections). You’ll find two buttons that specify the way your preview image is displayed:

display both ‘before’ and ‘after’ images in preview window

display ‘after’ image in preview window; the “before” image will

replace it while you maintain the left mouse button pressed on it. But there’s also a whole new group of four buttons, whose functions will be described later as we go through the tools palette.

Corrections Palette

Now let’s go and take a closer look at the corrections and adjustments that are accessible via the palette on the right-hand side. Don’t forget, in the description that follows, just like everywhere else in this Guide, you can click on the links indicated to obtain further details about a particular topic. Throughout the tools palette, you can click on the title bar to expand or shrink each tab at will; the title of opened tabs is shown in bold, to help you find your way around more easily. At the top comes the tools palette with four basic tabs:

Zoom has a small window that indicates the visible part of the image with a

green box that represents the assigned size of the preview area. As you would expect, the more you ‘zoom in’, the smaller the green box appears (you are looking more closely at a smaller part of the image). You can grab the box with the mouse to drag it around the screen in order to examine specific parts of an

image. The

button on the left hand end of the header bar lets you grab the main preview image to move it around when zoomed in. There is the same zoom slider as before, together with small zoom in/out buttons at either end. Maximum zoom in all cases is 200%, while the minimum zoom size depends

on the size you have set the preview pane to. The button in the header bar is another way of zooming in and out.

Histogram gives a graphical representation of the distribution of the relative

brightness levels in the image, across the red, green, and blue color channels. A very useful tool, you will probably find yourself leaving this open a lot of the time while you are adjusting color and exposure!

EXIF Editor brings up a tab with two text fields, where you can enter specific

information that will be added to the EXIF header. They concern the author and the copyright information of the picture.

Presets opens a small window with a list of available presets you can apply to

your image — you can apply all of the settings from a selected preset, or select

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

which particular corrections you wish to use. Of course, there is nothing to stop you from adjusting these same parameters manually later, in which case the preset values will be over-ridden for this particular image. Here, you can also perform elementary preset management operations.

Guided or Expert?

Immediately below these four tool tabs, there are two large buttons for ‘Guided settings’ and ‘Expert settings’.

‘Guided settings’ replaces the full corrections palette with a list of the four main correction groups: Optics, Sharpness, Color and Lighting. Alongside each of these is a drop-down menu where, in addition to the default ‘As shot’ (effectively, ‘automatic’), you can select from a list of any

custom presets you

may have saved. In this way, you might choose, for example, to apply the Lighting corrections stored in one preset, and the Color corrections stored in a different one. ‘Expert settings’ opens a ‘palette’ with access to the full range of corrections and adjustments, as detailed below. First there is a strip with eight buttons that open the eight corrections panels below. If the tab you want to open is hidden off screen because of other open tabs, these buttons are useful in letting you go straight to the panel you want, closing any others that are open. You can also open and close any panel just by clicking on its title bar tab.

Eight Correction palettes

Then, there are the eight principal tabs for the main groups of corrections. Note that under each tab certain corrections may not be available, depending on the images and correction modules you have loaded — the title of available corrections is shown in bold white text, whereas de-activated corrections are grayed out and not bold.

DxO Optics — the corrections for geometric distortion, chromatic aberration, purple fringing, and vignetting

Sharpen — DxO lens softness correction to correct for measured lens

characteristics and unsharp mask, to provide intelligent overall sharpening for images where no lens-specific module is available.

DxO Noise — noise reduction, minimizing both general and impulse noise

White balance and Exposure — white balance lets you adjust the overall color

balance of your images, either to correct for lighting color balance, or perhaps to create a specific effect. Exposure control with highlight recovery allows postshooting exposure adjustment, as well as offering the possibility of recovering apparently ‘lost’ highlight detail (with Raw format images only). You will use

here the White Balance Tool

located on top of the window.

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

DxO Color — enables you to adjust your colors in the Hue / Saturation / Lightness domain, which although not always the easiest or most intuitive to

use, has the advantage of allowing you to enter numeric (and hence repeatable) values very easily. Here you also have access to a powerful tone-

curve manipulation function that lets you adjust both the overall master tone

curve and the individual color channel curves, for absolute maximum flexibility. Two brand new features here are Color rendering and Color matching. The former lets you apply a specific ‘look’ to your images, starting right from the very ‘look’ of specific camera bodies, along with preset contrast and color saturation options, and some special presets: portrait and landscape, together with black & white and sepia effects. Color matching is a sophisticated way of achieving exact color matching between shots, even where a neutral color reference is missing. The system allows you to pick up to four colors and set the color they are each meant to reproduce as, and then DxO Optics Pro will make a best-compromise calculation to adjust the color balance of the entire image — what’s more, it can do this across a whole string of images, making it is easier than ever before to match critical colors between different shots. The Multi-Point Color

Balance tool

is located on the top left of the window.

DxO Lighting — corrects image contrast in an intelligent, adaptive way, using

global and local contrast adjustment to bring out shadow, mid-tone or highlight detail that might otherwise be lost. A ‘Fine settings’ button within this panel accesses additional controls for even more precise adjustment.

Geometry — corrections for Volume Anamorphosis Correction and Keystoning / Horizon. The former is a lens-dependent correction that is related to geometric

distortion. Being subject-matter dependent, this adjustment requires manual setting of the type and amount of correction. The remaining corrections provide adjustments to compensate for

keystoning

in both vertical and horizontal planes, image rotation (horizon correction),

scaling (image sizing) and H/V ratio (stretching / squeezing of

horizontal / vertical proportions). Clearly, these are entirely image-dependent and so do need to be set manually, with the help of the Keystoning – Horizon

tool located on top of the window.

Crop — last, but not least, here you can edit the composition of your image,

with the option to constrain the proportions to those of the original shot or certain preset formats, or to allow unrestricted cropping to custom formats. Click on the Crop Tool (top of the main window) to access this function.

When you have finished making any manual adjustments and/or applying any presets, the next logical step will be to start processing your images. You can click on Ctrl + R at any time, or select the Start Processing command from the Workflow menu, but, more than likely, you’ll want to move onto the next step by clicking on the ‘Process’ tab to select the appropriate workspace.

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

Chapter 5 — Process as many images as you want

with just one click

The top part of the ‘Process’ workspace is divided into three areas, plus the familiar Project pane at the bottom.

In the left-hand area ‘1-SELECTION’, you can implement the ‘star ranking’ you set earlier (and can still do in this workspace, since the thumbnails are still available); this is where you select which rank of images to process. There is a button for ‘All’, or you can again click to activate 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 (individually, or in combination).

Process the stars

You can select a higher-ranking star alone to specifically exclude lower rankings; so   will process only those images ranked . You can also make multiple selections, just by clicking on the corresponding stars; so for example   , will process only images ranked either or .

To process all images ranked up to , you need to select . Minithumbnails of the selected images will appear in the column below. Alongside

the star buttons is another button, which allows you to select only unranked images for processing.

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

The centre area ‘2-OPTIONS’, under ‘Destination directory’, has radio buttons for using either the default project directory or a specific directory — the browse button to the right opens a browser window where you can select an existing directory or create a new one.

Define output formats

Below this are three buttons for adding and/or selecting one or more output image formats. Each button (JPEG, TIFF, DNG) opens a dialog box with settings appropriate to that format. A summary of all available formats is shown, and you can click on

or  to enable or disable them for this batch.

You must have at least one output format active for processing to commence, otherwise you will see an error message when you press ‘Start’.

The right-hand area ‘3-PROCESSING’ has a big Start button, and gives status information about the progress of your project, along with controls to either ‘pause’ or ‘stop’ (i.e. abort) processing.

As soon as you click on ‘Start’, if you have not already saved your project since the last changes were made, you will be prompted to save it before proceeding.

You are kept informed of progress in processing your project by means of two progress bars, the top one showing the overall progress of the project as a whole, and the lower one indicating progress on the current image. During processing, upper ‘Pause’ and ‘Stop’ buttons allow you to halt processing temporarily or abort it altogether. Lower buttons similarly allow you to ‘Pause’ processing of the current image, or ‘Skip’ it altogether.

While processing is under way, the thumbnails of all images included for processing carry a [two cogs] icon. Once processing is completed, these change to a

 indicating that processing has been successful.

DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

Chapter 6 — View the results of your work

(with a little help from DxO)

The ‘View’ workspace has the now-familiar three resizable panes; the top lefthand pane shows before/after pair thumbnails of all your processed images, with buttons to skip to ‘Last batch’ and ‘All batches’. The image pair being viewed has a highlighted background.

The header bar in this workspace has, on the left-hand side, a [projector] button that gives access to the options for running a processed images. To the right of this is shown the (original) filename of the image displayed. To the right-hand end of the header bar are nine buttons, plus the usual group of zoom controls.

Here’s what they do:

and display previous / next image

and display next / previous output image — if you have selected more than one output format for a given image, lets you view the JPEG / TIFF / DNG images in turn. When you have reached one end or the other of the image series, the relevant button will be grayed out.

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DxO Optics Pro V4.2 Reference Manual

Chapter 7— How to go further

After going through a full typical session, you may want to explore more options. The powerful new DxO tools bring you many functions that you can fine tune in your own way. In the following chapters (that you’ll find only in the electronic version of this user guide), you can discover the various settings that can be applied to your photos and how you manipulate the corresponding palettes. Remember that your original picture is never modified: you can always create a new project, along with different settings applied to the same image or group of images.

Your workflow

Another point of interest concerns the way you integrate DxO Optics Pro to your personal workflow. You may use an image management software to download, index and preview your photographs. You may also invest in some heavyweight treatment and correction software, (whose name begins for instance with photo and finishes by shop). DxO Optics Pro must be used ahead of the latter, whose importance will be greatly reduced and, concerning the database software, you should make sure that the EXIF information stored in the image file has remained untouched. If not, you’ll prefer running your pictures through DOP before managing them with another package.

Thank you for using DxO Optics Pro V4! You will find more information on the pdf version of this user guide, and in the Frequently Asked Questions available on DxO’s website:

http://www.dxo.com/en/photo/support

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Dxo OPTICS PRO V4.2 User Manual

Specifications and Main Features

Frequently Asked Questions

User Manual