I downloaded the trial version of DXO pro and thought I'd test the differences between it and DPP. I took a RAW image I shot with my 40D which has more noise in certain shots and processed the images 2 ways. First I used DPP to process the image with no luminance or chrominance noise reduction where I left sharpness as shot which is like a plus 4 and a -2 on color saturation. Next I took the same image and processed it but used number 5 luminance and 2 chrominance RAW noise reduction.


In the end I have 3 images one with no noise reduction, one with the DPP reduction that I felt comfortable with and then the no noise reduction image that I then precessed in DXO.


I did not do any specialized things in DXO as I am new to it but I did take some of the preset out of the basic workspace and just selected the corrections for distortion, unsharp mask, noise and chromatic aberration. Images where then loaded into PS CS5 and cropped down about 30 percent at 100 dpi 1500px x 1000px and uploaded to flickr.


What is everyone else's thoughts? Is there something that i did not do correctly or needs to be redone? If in fact DXO does handle noise better then I will most likely buy it down the road but I'm not sure that there is a noticeable difference in my test. I'll keep looking at it for a couple of days and maybe I will have a different opinion.





Images taken off and replaced with new ones below.