If you follow this blog or if you’ve read my Lightroom book, you know that Lightroom is my primary raw converter. Still, I quite often use DxO Optics Pro. This software is both available as a standalone product and as a Lightroom plugin (actually, if you buy it, you can use it both ways).

The thing that is special about it, is that, unlike other Raw Converters, DxO’s image improvements are based on actual measurements of how different lenses behave on different cameras, at different focal lengths and ISO’s.

Such a camera-lens combination is called a module. As new lenses and cameras are developed, new modules are added to DxO’s site. The software comes in two flavours: Standard and Elite. If you have a fullframe sensor, you’ll need the Elite version (and you can consider yourself an elitist photographer, from now on ). The Standard version caters to DX or cropped sensor bodies. If you have both, you only need the Elite version, as it also gives you access to all of the modules of the Standard version. It also doesn’t matter if you have one or multiple cameras: let’s say you have a Nikon D700, a Nikon D90, a Canon 5DMkII a Canon 7D and a bag of lenses, you’d still only need one (Elite) license. You can install one license on two computers.

You can find out if your camera is supported on this page. There’s also a roadmap of the modules that will be incorporated in the near future.

Because of this tailor-made approach, it’s very easy to use DxO to automatically (batch-) correct lens problems like complex distorsion patterns, chromatic aberration, corner unsharpness, vignetting and so on. It also also a very handy tool for perspective correction.

You can download a one month trial version from their website. At the end of the trial, you can even ask for an extension for some time! However, it pays to make up your mind a little sooner: until the end of this year, you get a 30% discount. This applies both to the Windows version of the software (which is at version 6) as for the Mac version (which will be upgraded to version 6 in january – you get a free upgrade if you buy now). Depending on the version, the discount lets you save 50 to 100 €.

If it’s true that money less spent is money saved, than you can use your savings to pay (part of the) upgrade to Lightroom 3 later next year !

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