As part of the development of version 5, we have decided to extend the testing and quality assurance phase. We currently anticipate the release of DxO Optics Pro v5 Windows to occur in the 2nd half of November 2007. Regarding the Macintosh platform, we anticipate providing a revised release date towards the end of November.
DXO Optics Pro v5’s RAW conversion engine will include a completely new demosaicing engine producing images with much more detail and fewer artifacts, setting a new standard in image quality.
Demosaicing is the crucial step of RAW conversion during which the sensor output image (meaningless to the eye since it is made of a particular arrangement of color filters – namely Color Filter Array - used in the image sensor of digital cameras to create a color image) is reconstructed as a visible image for the human eye. The quality of demosaicing determines the amount of detail and artifacts in the final image. Inherently, demosaicing involves trade-offs between image sharpness, details, noise, processing time and conversion artifacts.
Ever since digital images have been shot using sensors with a Color Filter Array, they have been plagued by a number of disgraceful artifacts: false colors, unnatural 2×2 grain, maze like structures for example. These artifacts, particularly visible and unsightly are compounded at high ISO settings and are in large parts responsible for what is deemed the unnatural look of digital images.
Unwilling to live with these problems, DXO took a radical approach and turned a number of classical solutions on their head: Instead of only considering pixels with respect to their direct neighbors, DXO’s new RAW Engine uses a ‘non local’ approach looking much further afar than is usual from each pixel in the image in order to reconstruct detail.
A new noise removal technology for RAW images
The other key characteristic of DXO Optics Pro’s new RAW Engine is that instead of applying noise reduction techniques after demosaicing, a newly-developed noise reduction is performed upfront, before noise has a chance to be amplified by the conversion process and absorb important fine details.
Combined with other proprietary techniques, DXO Optics Pro v5’s new RAW Engine produces both the most detailed and most natural looking images yet, its very fine and homogenous grain translating into subtle shades and textures. DXO Optics Pro v5’s new RAW conversion engine has been fine-tuned and optimized with the rest of DXO’s automated image enhancement features (optical corrections, color rendering, exposure optimization, etc…) to produce best-in class results.
Dust & blemish removal tool
DXO Optics Pro v5 now incorporates a tool to remove dust and blemishes from any digital image. This feature has been very often requested by our current customer base and leads.
How does it work?
* Click on dust spots or blemishes with the mouse.
* DXO Optics Pro removes them automatically and provides a natural reconstruction of the scene.
* Any number of images can processed in batch mode with this particular dust/blemish template, leading to a significant productivity improvement.
An advanced technology has been developed and implemented in DXO Optics Pro for reconstructing textured areas and suppressing blemishes in complex scenes.
A new User Interface
Based on extensive work and dialogue with the photographic community, DXO Optics Pro’s user interface has been reorganized to improve workflow and ease of use. In particular tools are now organized into four main sections that match the photographer’s approach:
Light > Color > Geometry > Details
Users of DXO Optics Pro v5 can also customize their workspace to their particular way of working or choose to keep the tool organization of the previous version.
DXO Optics Pro’s powerful project and preset functionalities have also been overhauled for increased ease of use and functionality.
Dozens of other refinements and improvements have been added to DXO Optics Pro v5.
More speed, more cameras
Benefiting from an entire rewrite using Microsoft’s and Apple’s latest technologies, DXO Optics Pro v5 displays preview images up to 4 times faster than version 4, by taking further advantage of GPU processing – where the power of dedicated video card chips is used to accelerate an application multicore processor capability - where the previewed image is split into tiles that are independently processed by as many processors as available, and therefore now displayed on the monitor much faster than before.
DxO Optics Pro v5 will also support the latest Canon and Nikon Digital SLR camera bodies.
Support for the Canon 40D, Canon 1Ds MKIII, Nikon D300 and Nikon D3 will be included in DxO Optics Pro v5 over the next few months following the availability of these cameras.
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