Tony Northrup abandons Adobe and falls in love with DXO's PhotoLab 8

A week or so ago I watched a Tony and Chelsea Northrup video bemoaning Adobe's current business plan. They not only castigated the subscription model, but also the use of subscribers' photos to develop Adobe's AI models. It was pretty strong stuff. In a further solo video, Tony criticises Adobe's use of customers' photos.

Today I came across Tony's "review" of PhotoLab 8. He is absolutely up front about this video being sponsored by DXO PhotoLab, and as sponsored reviews go, this one is fair. Yes, he waxes lyrical about the new post-processing love of his life. But he highlights the strengths of the program with good examples. After seeing other reviews and tutorials, I found it refreshing that he gets right into the subject without BS or high pressure salesmanship.

Disclaimer: I am just a satisfied customer of DXO: I have been using the program since it was Photolab 4 and am very happy with the results I get. It took me a while to understand how things work differently than in Photoshop, and I have needed to look at a lot of tutorials, as I found the manuals hard to grasp. I gradually weaned myself from Photoshop (CS5), function by function, and am amazed at the results that I can obtain from photos taken in highly adverse circumstances. The quality of the noise reduction is unbelievable.

There is a free 30-day trial version of PL8 available. DXO have generous upgrade discounts, and further Black Friday discounts are expected.

David

I used DXO for many years, because it was the only Raw converter that delt with the horrific green CA type fringing that my 12-35 Panasonic lens produced with my EM5i. I still have a copy.

But I changed to Capture One, with my Nikon gear, as the masking tools were/are better.

I pay large sums of money on superscriptions for my Engineering software. The Capture One subscription is pretty cheap compared to SAP2000, or Autocad.

Even Photoshop Elements is now slowly transitioning to a sort of subscription model going from perpetual licences to 3 year licences.

Anyway, for me a huge advantage of both PSE and Ps is that they both support JavaScript.

JavaScript enables me to write scripts (more powerful than Actions) to automate and speed up edits on a single or multiple files at a time.

You can also create your own customised dialogue boxes for controlling edits and inputs for edits.

I quit Adobe around ACR V.7 and my computer has been Adobe-free for many years - including Acrobat and Flash.

Never bothered with PS or LR - so no "all is forgiven" from me.

For serious work, it's the GIMP or RawTherapee for me, FWIW.

all i can say is photoshops clone tool is just crap compared to 4 years ago. they have gone backwards not forwards. AI is not working it cant even apply a simple clone to an area.

It still works very well for me.

Can you post a screenshot including the tool settings and image for which you say the clone tool does not work.

I am not sure what the purpose of this thread is, apart from maybe wanting to spruik DXO, since people will eventually gravitate to apps that suit them best.

DXO like most other apps would be a ball and chain on my post processing as described earlier and I can create images in Ps that cannot be created in DXO.

Just use whatever app suits your style and requirements best.

Why should I care if Tony abandons Adobe and fall in love with DXO PL8. I have my own opinion. To fully use PL you have to buy FP, VP, some pixel editor and printing SW.

What are FP and VP?

FilmPack and ViewPoint

Ta ...