DxO PhotoLab 8 for Infrared Photography

In this video, I’ll explore DxO PhotoLab 8’s capabilities for infrared photography. Learn to set a white balance, use custom profiles, swap colors, and use LUTs effectively for your infrared images. I’ll dive into new features like enhanced Tone Curves, real-time Noise Reduction previews, and Hue Range Masks.

DxO PhotoLab 8

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Transcript for DxO PhotoLab 8 for Infrared Photography. Duration: 15:10.

• 0:00 Is DxO PhotoLab 8 a good raw editor for infrared photography? Does version 8 address any of my feature requests from version 7? Are there any new features that are particularly beneficial for infrared images? Let's dive in. The first thing that we want to do is set a white balance. The way that PhotoLab is
• 0:20 organized is with all of these modules on the right hand side. You can see all of them if none of the tabs are selected, or you can select a tab to just see the modules that are part of that tab. So for a white balance, I'm going to go into the color tab. And you can see here I can set a white balance. I've got a white balance
• 0:39 picker. So I'll grab that picker and I will click the side of the building here. And that will get me a pretty good white balance. You can see that it is 2342. The white balance goes down to 2000, but 2342 is pretty good. So that works well. One of the nice things about DxO PhotoLab is it does take DCP profiles. So you can use the custom profiles from the
• 1:04 Infrared Profile Pack if you're having trouble setting a good white balance. In the color and black and white rendering section, the normal type is generic rendering. But I can select from this list and at the bottom select DCP profile. And that'll allow me to import a custom DCP profile. In this case, under rendering,
• 1:24 select import to import that file, such as from the Infrared Profile Pack. And then I can select the specific profile that I want to use. In this case, I'll use the negative 100 profile for the GFX 50S. Once I've selected a profile, I can go back and use the white balance picker to
• 1:42 click on my image and set a good white balance. So lots of great options here in DxO PhotoLab for setting a good white balance. Now let's talk about the four methods for swapping colors. The first two methods that we'll talk about are not supported. That is the channel mixer and the invert method.
• 2:00 The channel mixer, there is a channel mixer here in DxO, but it's actually used for black and white rendering. So it's not really appropriate for what we need for swapping colors. And then the invert method needs layers, which DxO doesn't have. And so we don't have the invert method available to us, but we do have two other
• 2:19 methods available. Hue and LUTs. So let's talk about each of those. We'll start with the hue method. To do that, we'll go into the HSL panel. So I'll activate the HSL panel. And then once here, I've got a list of channels. Now I want to start by impacting all of the channels. So I'll make sure that this white option, the all colors is selected. And
• 2:41 from here, I can grab this pin on the outside and I can drag it around about 180 degrees to the other side or actually wherever you like to swap my colors. So this would be about a 180. But what's nice is that I can then tweak it a little bit one way or another. So let's say if I was going for a
• 3:00 blue sky, I could bring it down this way, find some happiness between the teal here and the purple here, find a color of sky that I was happy with, and then I could settle in there. Now once I've made that adjustment, I can actually make adjustments to the sky and the foliage colors independently. So the
• 3:19 way I would do that is select the eyedropper. We'll start with the sky. If I select the sky with the eyedropper, you'll see that it now highlights to the blue channel here. And I've got a section of this color wheel that's selected for blue. And now if I make adjustments to the sky, moving
• 3:37 this pin will again adjust the hue so I can make those adjustments here. So tweak the sky a little bit more or I could adjust the saturation so I could kick up the saturation if I wanted more or I could impact the luminance of the sky, the luminance of the color within the sky. And then there's an option for uniformity.
• 3:56 So how much do I want that to be impacted across the different tonalities, the different brightnesses of the sky? Next, I'll take the color picker again and this time we'll click on the grass, the foliage in this image. And this will give me a different slice of the color wheel. So in this
• 4:12 case it's orange and now from here I can make the same adjustments. So I could either adjust the hue to give me a different color in this image if I wanted more of a rose or a red or a violet or purple or I could go in the other direction towards a yellow, gold or green. I can pick whatever color I like for this for the
• 4:32 grass and it's only going to affect the hues that are impacted on the color wheel. And I can also tweak these so I can grab these and extend them out if I feel like the colors in my image are not particularly getting grabbed. how much of the hues are being affected. And once again I can adjust the
• 4:50 saturation, I can adjust the luminance, so brighter, maybe a little darker. So that's how we swap colors using a hue swap in the HSL panel. Now to show you the other method I will disable this to undo all of those adjustments. Next, let's look at LUTs and we'll do that in the LUT grading module. So I will enable that
• 5:10 module. There are a number of options under type. I've got standard and premium. These are the LUTs that come pre-loaded with DxO but of course that's not what I'm looking for. I want a custom LUT in order to be able to swap colors. So I'll come down to custom then once in custom I can look at the options available under rendering. So I've
• 5:30 loaded up a number of options from my PRO Infrared LUTs pack and you can see all of those here. If I roll over each one of these each one will do a different color treatment on the image. So we can see a whole variety of color treatments. You could use PRO LUTs that I have available. I've got a collection of free LUTs that are
• 5:49 available as well that include all of the color swap options to get you these different looks. The one thing that I think could be improved here is the handling of lots of LUTs. So this little drop down is great when you've got about maybe 10 LUTs. You can open them up and preview them but when you get more than that you've got a scroll
• 6:09 between them. The other problem is that each LUT has to be imported individually. You can't import a folder of LUTs which is kind of tedious. The PRO Infrared LUT pack has over 200 LUTs in it which would be very tedious to import. This could be an improvement for a future version of DXO Photo Lab how we display
• 6:28 and pick from the available LUTs. So let's select one of these LUTs to use. Let's see I will use rose. It very quickly applies this change and that's all you need to do. So LUTs are a great way to swap colors in DxO PhotoLab. Let's talk about some of the new features that are available in DxO PhotoLab
• 6:48 version 8. And the first thing that I want to look at is in the tone curve. So if I go back to the light tab and we select tone curve and open this up and I'll activate it. There's a couple new things that are here that I had for in the last version. I don't know if it was because I asked for them or not but
• 7:06 I think they're great features to have added. The first one is presets. presets is a really nice way to give you good starting point or to just throw a curve in. So we've got a whole bunch of presets which is actually really great. And let's talk about some of them specifically. So we've got light, medium and strong contrast for RGB. So this is a
• 7:26 great way to add contrast to your image and I love adding contrast to images. And so that's a great tool to use. these are similar to what you might find in Lightroom or Photoshop. They would have like say a medium and a strong contrast. But that's kind of it. The other thing that's really nice is you've got these luminance based
• 7:44 adjustments to the tone curve as well. So if I select that you'll see that there's a separate line in here. And this kind of gets to another key piece of this is that in addition to the RGB we've got a breakdown of the red channel, the green channel, the blue channel and the luminance
• 8:02 channel. And now you can see the highlighted dots of the luminance channel that was made by adding the light contrast luma. What's the difference between the luma adjustment and the RGB adjustment? If I go back to linear which resets all of these you can kind of see the difference. So
• 8:18 let's compare. So if we look at a strong contrast RGB what you'll notice is we're getting a lot of that strong contrast but that's also affecting individual colors. So it's having a dramatic impact particularly in the foreground colors. If I reset to linear and then select strong contrast from luma you can see that this is adding
• 8:39 contrast to the image but it's not changing the saturation of the individual colors. So that's kind of powerful if you don't want to oversaturate the colors just to add some contrast. So that's a very nice feature these luma presets. We also let me reset this back to linear. We also have a cross process
• 8:59 different things with the colors to add some variety so you could try that out. We have also a faded look which you could look at and then a negative. So these presets are a great way to quickly add contrast to an image or to give you a starting point. So for example if I said I want medium contrast and then I wanted to go in
• 9:18 and add points on top of that I can do that without starting from scratch on The other thing that's new about the Tone Curve is the tone picker and this allows me to, if I highlight it, point to a part of the image and as you can see as I point to different parts of the image then they're reflected in a
• 9:37 dot on the curve and if I click on the image and then drag up or down it will have a direct impact on that tone curve and this is great because then I can pick different parts of the image that I want to lighten and darken without using the curve itself. So for example I could go here and bring this up so if I wanted to
• 9:59 create a lot of contrast in this peaked area between this I've got this down one dot here that's below the main line and a dot above the main line to create some contrast. Once I've used the tone picker I can also go in and make adjustments to these here on the tone curve itself so I can use a combination of using the picker
• 10:18 and using the dots on the tone curve to adjust my tones. So a lot of power now is available in the tone curve between the presets and the tone picker and you don't have to do everything manually just by purely putting dots on the line itself. PhotoLab continues to be a leader when
• 10:37 it comes to noise reduction in images. if I go over to this third tab detail I can look at the de-noise technologies that are available. If I highlight that before I do that let me zoom in on a part of an image that is particularly dark. There's not a lot of noise in this image but I'm sure I can find something in the shadows that will
• 10:57 show me a little bit of noise. So here we go. So we've got this side of this building here with some little bit of color noise here. So if I turn on the de-noise then a full preview is in progress but within a second it actually does a de-noise of this section. And then I've got the newest version the Deep Prime XD,
• 11:17 XD2S. If I click that then that will very quickly make an adjustment to the noise levels in this image. One of the things that's really nice about DxO is it does this on the fly and it does it without the need for creating a new file. With Adobe products currently they're testing a new version of noise reduction in Camera
• 11:39 Raw which does not require a new DNG file but in Lightroom you still need to create a new DNG file to get the kind of really strong and powerful noise reduction. So that gives DxO a bit of an edge when it comes to noise reduction. When I go back out to my full image it takes just about a second
• 11:57 this to then render all of the noise reduction across the entire image. Great noise reduction here available in DxO PhotoLab. Another new feature in DxO is an improvement to masking. So masking is this tab over here on the right called local adjustments. This gives us an opportunity to do a whole variety of masks from control points
• 12:18 like you would see from the Nik Collection to radial gradients, luminosity masks, brushes, erasers, etc. The new feature here is the hue mask. For example, let's say that I wanted to make an adjustment to the sky and I wanted to do that with say a gradient. So if I did a linear gradient across the sky that's nice but if I wanted to apply these effects
• 12:42 it's going to affect these buildings and then if I wanted to get rid of the buildings I'd have to do an erase and then I would have to use my brush to come in and erase the parts that I didn't want to deal with you can see that would be very time consuming and difficult to get a precise mask.
• 12:58 So instead of doing that let me click this mask, this local adjustment I will use the hue mask and using the hue mask I'll click a part of the sky and now this will highlight all the parts of the image that match this hue, this color as you see down here in mask options I have some abilities to affect this. I could
• 13:18 change the opacity of this mask but I could come down into this color bar and affect what are impacted by the mask. between these two dotted lines is the full strength of the mask and you can control that with these bars up at the top or with of course these numbers, these number boxes along either side.
• 13:39 Then the sloped line to the bottom represents a gradation away from full strength and so I could adjust that as well. So I could get this to the point that I wanted to and try to eliminate add in different colors if I wanted those to be included as part of this mask. Now on top of this you could still go in and do an
• 13:59 erase for example and erase portions of the image that you didn't want to but this still gives you a great leg up on selecting the part of the image that you want. One of the things that's nice about doing this with the sky I can scroll down to DxO ClearView Plus which is sort of like a dehaze tool that
• 14:18 will allow me to remove haze from the sky. And if I do this to adjust the sky I can actually set this to a pretty high value, I don't want to do it to the rest of the image but I can limit the effect here to the sky and I can make any other adjustments that I want. The new addition of this hue mask
• 14:33 provides some great options for masking for local adjustments in DxO PhotoLab. So definitely headed in the right direction, would love to see more tools added here to increase the ability to add and subtract between more tools or intersect between tools in future versions. So just like version 7, DxO PhotLab 8 is a
• 14:53 solid raw editor for infrared images with an easy to use interface. Do you use DxO PhotoLab for your infrared images? Let us know in the comments. If you find these videos helpful on your infrared photography journey, like, subscribe or comment. Hope you enjoyed, thanks.