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If you're a photographer, listen up. I recently created a series of tutorials for the just released DxO PhotoLab 8 which are all on the DxO website, but I'm posting one of them right here for you guys. This video is an overview of the entire app, and it highlights a few new features, so it's a great way to see what a non-subscription based photo editor can do for you. PhotoLab has got amazing optical corrections, ridiculous denoising capabilities, and the super powerful Control Points from the Nik Collection built right in. If you want to try it out, look for the download link and discount code in the description below, or just type PhotoJoseph.com/DxO into your browser. By using my link and discount code, you'll get 30 days free AND 15% off your purchase through the end of October if you decide to keep it.

DxO PhotoLab has two primary functions; to organize and manage your photos and to process or enhance your photos. We all know that with digital photography, when we press that shutter button, we're only halfway there. The image has been created, but now you have to finalize it. DxO PhotoLab 8 is packed with amazing features to take those photos across the finish line. In this video, I'm going to take you on a high-level tour of DxO PhotoLab, showing you where and how to find all the tools you need while highlighting a few of the newest features in this latest version, PhotoLab 8. PhotoLab works in two primary tabs, the Photo Library tab and the Customize tab. We'll start in the Photo Library. One of the things you'll notice about PhotoLab is that you do not have to import your images. In fact, there is no import. All you do is browse your hard drive, any folder on your drive, either a local drive or an external drive, as I am here, or even across a network. That way, you can look at any photo anywhere at any time. In PhotoLab, I have a list of my favorites. For example, there's my Pictures folder, I can dig into any folder on my hard drive or my external drive. I'm going to select this folder. Now I'm looking at the thumbnails of all the photos in this folder. As I select any image, over on the right, you'll see its metadata. We have its basic EXIF data, as well as advanced EXIF data if you click on this button here. Down below that, you'll find all the IPTC fields; Contact, Content, and so on. To change the size of your thumbnails, simply drag this slider here. And if you want a larger preview of an image, grab this bar here at the top and drag that down to reveal a large preview window. PhotoLab gives you a variety of tools to organize your photos the way that you want to. You can simply do Picks or Rejects, you can add star ratings, or you can even add color labels; whatever you like to do. To mark a pick or reject, simply click on the green or red button next to it. That one's a pick, that one's a reject, and so on. To add star ratings, you'll notice that there's a row of five stars under each thumbnail. Simply click on the number of stars that you want to assign it, or you can assign it with a keyboard shortcut. To add a color label, click on the title of the image and choose the color here, or once again, there's the keyboard shortcut. Once you've picked or rejected or rated your photos, you can sort and filter by those criteria. Up here at the top, I have the ability to filter, and I can filter by my picked images, by any star rating, or let's take a look at just the Rejects. with the Rejects revealed, it's easy to select those, right click remove them. Note that in PhotoLab, when you remove a photo, you're simply removing it from the library, which is actually moving it from that folder into your system's trash. It doesn't actually delete the image. And of course, you can sort by these criteria. I'll sort by color label, and if I want to reverse that sort order, you'll see a small triangle to the left of the name; just click that, and it resorts it. To customize an image, you can either select the thumbnail and click on the customize button, or just double click on any thumbnail. One of the most significant benefits of using DXO PhotoLab is the built-in image correction, created from thousands of hours of testing, comparing, and developing corrections on test images shot with the same camera and lens combinations that you use. The first time you open one of your photos, PhotoLab will prompt you to download a DXO Optics Module that is unique to that camera and lens combination, resulting in the best out-of-the-box image correction available. When you first install PhotoLab, it'll ask you how you want your images adjusted by default. “Natural”, meaning both optical and image corrections are automatically applied… “Optical Corrections Only”, meaning only the optics modules are applied, but color and lighting adjustments are not, or “No corrections”. With “Natural” selected, you'll already have both optical and lighting corrections applied when you first open them. Watch as I compare this image to its original. You can see a slight distortion of the horizon line, and you'll also notice a heavy vignetting on original image from the lens that has now been corrected. Now let's take a quick tour of the Customize window. First of all, at the bottom, you'll notice that you still have your thumbnails visible, which you can change the size of, or completely collapse that if you want to free up more space for image editing. In the top left is the Histogram, then underneath that is the Move and Zoom tool. This allows you to easily navigate your image once you've zoomed into it. Under that, you'll find your History. This shows you all the different adjustments that have been made to that photo, so you can easily go back or forward in time to go back to earlier changes, or to come back to where you left off. To collapse any of these tabs, just click on the title, and underneath History, you'll see there's a Preset Editor as well. There's a variety of tools across the top, including the compare button, a split view or side-by-side compare, various zoom tools including a precise zoom percentage, the loupe, the hand tool, the crop tool, white balance selector, and a bunch more. Over on the right, you'll see a reset button and the presets button that allows you to not only apply presets, but actually preview what they'll look like before you apply them. Then on the right-hand side, we find the most important part of this page, all of the adjustments. By default, you're going to see a collection of what are called basic tools. This is your most common adjustments like white balance, exposure, highlights and shadows control, and so on. But there's actually a lot more tools than just this inside of PhotoLab, so here's how you can find them. Across the top, you'll notice a row of buttons. These are categories showing all the different tools in here for particular criteria. For example, this is lighting, so you have exposure, smart lighting, selective tone, your curves, and so on. The next one is colors. This is where you'll find things like white balance, color processing, HSL tools, and more. And then you have a variety of other tools across the top as well, all the way over here, to the local adjustments, which allow you to do precise adjustments to any part of your image. In the top right, you'll see two filter buttons. This one filters by all the corrections that have already been applied. This allows you to very easily see every adjustment that has been applied, and none of the ones that haven't. Next to that, you'll have a favorite filter. You can mark any adjustment as a favorite by simply clicking on that little star icon, and then when you click the favorites filter, it'll show you just your favorite corrections. If you're not sure where a tool is, you can actually search for it by simply typing in the name. For example, curve. There's my tone curve, and in the tone curve, we have a new tool called the luminance curve. With an RGB curve, if I adjust the curves on the image, it's going to affect the saturation, but with a luminance curve, it'll adjust the exposure without affecting the saturation of the image. You also have a new tone picker, which allows you to click on any part of the image and drag up or down to make it brighter or darker. So I can darken the clouds and brighten the sky just like that, and you'll see that it's added the appropriate point at the exact right spot on the curve for me. I'll reset that search and load up another image. For this photo, I want to go into the denoising tools. PhotoLab is famous for its DeepPRIME noise reduction, and this latest version of PhotoLab has the latest version of DeepPRIME called XD2S. Check this out. To get a closer look at the image, I can zoom into it to 100% here, or I can open the loupe tool, a small or large window that allows me to view the image at 100% without zooming into the whole thing. This tool is necessary when you're applying noise reduction. The noise reduction is so processor intensive that it's only applied to the entire image when you render it out. To preview it, you actually preview it through the loupe while looking at it at 100%. Watch the noise in the background of this image when I click on DeepPRIME XD2S. Boom – look at how clean that is! It's absolutely phenomenal. To see this effect on the entire image, I can export it. The export menu is down here on the bottom right, and from the export window, you'll see that there's a variety of preset exports, but you can also add your own. Additionally, you can select multiple presets at once to export multiple image sizes and types at the same time. In this case, I'll just export a standard JPEG and click the export button. To check the status of your export, click on this button here. By default, PhotoLab is going to export the image into the same folder as the original, which means it's going to show up in PhotoLab right next to the original image, like so. There's the original RAW, and there's the JPEG I just exported. One of the really cool things you can do in here is actually compare the RAW image to the export. Now, when I click the compare button – let's zoom into 100% – We're going to compare the currently affected image, to the JPEG output. Now that you know the basics of DXO PhotoLab 8, I encourage you to watch more of these videos to learn how to use some of PhotoLab's most exciting features.

If you liked what you saw, download the free trial from PhotoJoseph.com/DxO and get your 15% off discount code, and if you want to see the rest of these tutorials I made, those are linked there, too! Thanks for watching, and see you in the next video.