Optimized exposure and contrast for all scenes

A substantial proportion of photos have some harsh shadows in which details stay invisible. Sometimes it is a backlit subject, or an area of the scene where the sunlight is blocked from entering (for example, a porch or a vault). Or someone is wearing a hat that partially darkens his or her face. Someone may have  a very dark complexion or is wearing very dark clothes.

In all these cases, skilled darkroom technicians in the film era would practice “dodging”: with the help of various home-made instruments, they would block the light from falling on excessively dark shadows. The result was mostly good, even if dodged zones often lacked contrast.

DxO Lighting engine uses a similar technique, but with considerable improvements:

• DxO Lighting automatically detects which zones need to be brightened;
• DxO Lighting not only enhances local brightness, but raises local contrast as well, in coordination with its management of global contrast;
• DxO Lighting keeps intact the subtle shades of color in the shadows which have been brightened, to preserve the natural look of your photo.

Get HDR-like effect with just one shot!

HDR (High Dynamic Range) is a new trend in photography, whose purpose is to raise the richness of details in both highlights and shadows of your photos, by shooting several identical views with bracketed exposures (e.g., -2 stops, 0, +2 stops).

A powerful alternative solution consists in shooting only 1 photo and using the specialized “HDR presets” included with DxO Optics Pro. This preset uses the full power of the new DxO Lighting engine (available from version 6.5). Basically, it allows an extreme level of brightening within excessive shadows, all while:

• preserving the quality of colors, and in particular avoiding excessive saturation and unnatural appearance when the correction is applied at high levels;
• maintaining a very low level of noise, thanks to the exclusive de-noising engine built into DxO Optics Pro, and calibrated by our own labs for your specific camera model.

The single-shot HDR preset, like any other preset, can be applied to any image entering DxO Optics Pro workflow. It will instantly apply a complex set of corrections to an image (or batch of images) and allow immediate processing without requiring any manual settings.

Preserving highlights is of first importance for any digital photographer. This is because camera sensors get saturated above certain levels of light received, any light above this level is treated as pure white.

But though they give their full attention to this phenomenon, and though they try to slightly underexpose their images, photographers frequently encounter saturated or nearly saturated highlights. Sometimes they are simply due to strong light reflection. Very often they appear in shots of the sky, in which clouds appear uniformly white and lack details.

DxO Optics Pro has a specialized “Highlight recovery” engine, which adjusts the exposure level of the global image to the exact amount necessary to recover highlights. This engine is even able to reconstruct highlights for which the information is partly absent: when one of the three colored channels is not clipped, this remaining “unclipped” channel is used as a basis for calculating the values of the two “clipped” channels.

It is important to note that Highlight recovery works in close relationship with DxO Lighting. Since Highlight recovery tends to lower the global exposure level, it has a natural tendency to make shadows deeper and to lose some details in these regions. DxO Lighting then adds its touch by opening the shadows, while leaving intact previously-recovered highlights.