DxO PhotoLab 6’s DeepPRIME XD engine takes AI-powered raw file denoising to the next level

DxO has announced their newest version of PhotoLab. PhotLab 6 comes with brand new DeepPRIME XD denoising tech, with advanced colour management features – including a whole new colour space – powerful new retouching tools and refinements to its media library system.

DxO’s DeepPRIME tech has been around for a little while now, but the new DeepPRIME XD (eXtreme Details) mode adds further quality enhancements to help remove noise while keeping the details in high ISO raw files. It uses a neural network trained on billions of images to give noise level improvements of more than 2.5 stops, the company claims.

This means that an image shot at ISO4000 will look similar to an image that was shot at ISO500 in terms of not only noise but colour and clarity, too, once you’ve run it through the DeepPRIME XD engine. And this is all done to the original raw data, providing as much information as possible before you send it into Photoshop or other image editing applications.

We were thrilled by the response to DeepPRIME in DxO PhotoLab 5, but we knew we could do more. The new DeepPRIME XD has been a year in development and the AI has literally been teaching itself how to do its job better. The results speak for themselves.

– Jean-Marc Alexia, DxO VP of Marketing and Product Strategy

PhotoLab 6 also introduces new colour processing algorithms along with an extended working colour space, allowing you to retain the most colour information as possible while processing your images. A Soft Proofing feature allows you to see how your images will look in your final export colour space while working in the extended space, allowing you to keep those rich saturated colours and take better advantage of wide gamut displays and printers.

A new ReTouch tool extends the capability of healing and cloning “well beyond that of other raw processing software”, with transforms that support mirroring, rotating and scaling instead of simply cloning areas pixel by pixel from another part of the image. Its goal is to help keep as much of the retouching workflow in the non-destructive raw workflow before heading into applications like Photoshop.

The PhotoLibrary system has also been extended in PhotoLab 6 to add more EXIF and IPTC tags, project nesting and colour labels for easier file organisation and management without “clumsy, time-consuming catalogs” – I wonder who that was aimed at.

Naturally, PhotoLab 6 sees more updates to its Optics Modules with new camera and lens correction profiles. DxO says their “Optics Modules remain unmatched by its competitors”. They say this is down to the fact that the camera and lenses are actually tested in combination with each other, rather than one-size-fits-all profiles for a given lens, regardless of the camera being used. New modules are downloaded automatically to ensure you always have the latest profiles and the most accurate results.

DxO PhotoLab 6 for Windows and Mac are available to download from the DxO website today priced at $139 for PhotoLab 6 Essential or $2129 for PhotoLab 6 Elite. Owners of PhotoLab 4 or 5 can get special upgrade prices of $75 and $99 for PhotoLab 6 Essential and Elite versions respectively.