| Greg's experience with DxO Optics "Pro" |
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I very seldom use commercial software, but free photographic software is often inadequate. One product that has been warmly recommended for the quality of its output is DxO Optics “Pro”, a raw image converter that can apply multiple corrections to the images, including lens and camera specific geometry and chromatic aberration corrections. I don't know what “Pro” means: there are two versions, DxO Optics “Pro” normal version and DxO Optics “Pro” “Elite” for more expensive cameras; otherwise they're identical. Fortunately my camera is supported by the cheaper version.
It's an amazing mixture of good and bad. On the good side, yes, the quality of the images I get out of it is good, and that's the reason I actually paid money for it. On the other hand, it's so buggy and so inefficiently implemented that it drives me mad. In addition, the “support” department may be able to help people who are having (presumably mainly understandable) difficulties using the product, but they seem to be completely unwilling to accept that the product has any deficiencies, even in the fact of hard evidence. I've been continually told that the problem was with my configuration: using a virtual machine, using the wrong version of Microsoft “Windows”, not using enough memory (though it was more than the specified requirements), using a 32 bit operating system (also in the specs).
The problems I see are:
It only runs on Microsoft and Apple. That's pretty much par for the course, but for me it's an irritation in itself.
It's glacially slow. When I first tried it, it took about a minute per image. On Apple it's even slower. Then they brought out a new version, which they claimed was much faster, so I borrowed a laptop from Chris Bahlo to try it out. Only 12 seconds per image! So I bought it, and discovered that on my system it still took about 2 minutes per image.
In the end I installed a virtual machine with Microsoft “Windows” 8 pre-release, using all 4 CPUs of my main machine. And still it took about a minute per image.
As the result of claims that this configuration (both VM and Microsoft 8) was not supported, and was probably the reason for my other problems (see below) I bought a used Lenovo ThinkCenter with Microsoft Vista specifically to run the software. No obvious improvement.
The conversion speed seems to vary at random by a factor of more than 2. My latest configuration (ThinkCenter and Microsoft Vista) has 2 processors, and DxO converts two images in parallel. The time per image ranges between 18 seconds and 65 seconds for no obvious reason. The machine isn't doing anything else, so it can't be that.
Looking at the Task Manager, this uses three processes: DXOOpticsPro.exe, which appears to be the controlling program, and DopCor.exe, which seems to do the conversions. But look at the CPU time usage (third column, %):
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DXOOpticsPro.exe, which should be idling, is using fully 24% of the CPU, while one of the conversion processes is hardly using any more. What's it doing? My best guess is that it's not doing anything. This seems to be the minimum amount of CPU time that it uses, even when idle.
Screen refresh might be one issue. Under remote desktop, some parts don't get refreshed at all:
The big area in the middle should be the currently selected image (shown in small at top left), but in fact it's the remainder of the desktop decoration. This one is particularly irritating because this is exactly the main processing window, where you can apply corrections and should be able to see the results in the area that doesn't get refreshed. It works locally, with limitations, but there should be no reason why it shouldn't work under remote desktop.
Others seem to get refreshed sometimes, but not reliably. Sometimes it can take several seconds for an update to occur, even on a local display. Clearly there are serious problems with the screen handling.
File access is also a mess. Like almost all Microsoft-centric programs, it expects me to select files with the mouse rather than giving the names with wildcards, and I have to find the directories like a monkey, by climbing down the directory tree. So I link the images that I want to process into a directory specially designed for this purpose. But that means refreshing when I have new images. DxO provides for this with the F5 key. But it's so slow, at least over SMB file systems. On occasion I've had to wait several minutes.
This particular bug seems to be related to the way DxO recognizes changes in the directory. Possibly, instead of re-reading the directory, it checks some attribute that says whether it has changed. If I change to a second directory and then back to the first, it's much faster, without being fast.
The settings don't get saved in a consistent manner. Some can't be saved at all, like the choice of which images to display in the “process” window, or the choice of aspect ratio in the crop tool, which defaults to maintaining the source aspect ratio, and has to be set Every Time.
If you remove destination files from the current directory while DxO is processing, it will crash in about 2 times out of 3. If you remove unprocessed source files, on the other hand, it handles the situation correctly. I reported this bug by the crash feedback in about June 2012, but it still appears to happen.
The “process” window display is particularly irritating because it displays the images out of sequence. This appears to be the only bug that DxO admit to, but they're not planning to fix it any time soon.
Other settings that get “lost” are the optical corrections, such as distortion and chromatic aberrations. I'm not completely sure that this is not a setting I have forgotten, but so far I can't work out when and why it happens.
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