A new generation RAW converter: Overview

DxO Optics Pro v5’s RAW conversion engine includes a completely new demosaicing engine producing images with much more detail and fewer artifacts, setting a new standard in image quality.

Competitor RAW converters used to generate example images in this page include (in no specific order) Apple Aperture, Adobe Camera RAW 4.1, Nikon Capture NX, SilkyPix, PhaseOne v4 Beta, Bibble

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 2x2 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.

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