It has been a difficult October, as most of the month has been spent in Italy with multiple trips to deal with family health problems – fortunately all now resolved successfully. This has meant that photography has been very constrained, both in time and also by the ability to carry camera gear on easyJet, so these are a somewhat random set taken with walks around the area of Sesto San Giovanni in Milan and also on a brief excursion to Como.

All images taken with the GFX100s and GF45, GF55 or GF80 lenses and processed in DxO PhotoLab 7. The images were processed in B&W partly because I like the results, but mostly because it was too difficult to find a coherent colour processing for image set taken in wildly diverging conditions and light. I am pleased to report that PL7 has much improved B&W processing support, particularly when combined with DxO’s FilmPack.

In many of the more subscription adverse parts of the photography community, DxO PhotoLab has already supplanted Capture One or Lightroom as the standard for all photo processing, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is buggy, or at least wildly confusing, it scores over the other works in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words NO SUBSCRIPTION NEEDED inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

I still struggle with PhotoLab, which is almost – but not quite – a replacement for Capture One. Today’s discovery was that PhotoLab projects can not be arranged with a manual sort order – which kind of makes them completely pointless.

PhotoLab’s strengths remain its noise reduction and simple interface. Masking, although without the latest AI technology, works extremely well and PL7 has significantly improved the local-editing user-interface and has also added the ability to apply local colour corrections. The RAW processor also comfortably beats out both Lightroom and Capture One for noise and detail – although there is a bug in the GFX RAW pipeline that unfortunately causes shadow when pushing shadow detail by an extreme amount – albeit an amount that does not result in banding in other RAW processors.

PhotoLab’s greatest weaknesses come from DxO’s limited development resources. DxO is typically the last software to gain updates for the latest cameras or lenses, and features usually lag behind the competition. But when it does what is needed, DxO’s image quality is second to none.

Now all I need is for DxO to fix the GFX banding problem and to provide a lens correction module for the GF 55mm…