DxO Pure Raw 5

DxO PureRAW 5 is a powerful tool for photographers seeking to enhance their RAW images with minimal effort. The software excels in noise reduction and optical correction, leveraging DxO’s renowned algorithms.

Its user-friendly interface makes it accessible for both beginners and professionals. The integration with Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop streamlines the workflow, allowing seamless transitions between editing stages.

While it may not replace full-fledged editing software, PureRAW 5 is an excellent addition to any photographer’s toolkit, offering significant improvements in image quality with just a few clicks, but allowing you to retain your usual tools and workflow. It is a genuine win-win.

Pure Raw 5 User Interface

It’s deceptively simple. The image’s you’ve selected, from the file explorer or Lightroom, show as thumbnails. Select them, click Process, and Pure RAW applies DxO’s unique quality and noise reduction tools, producing a DNG that you then edit in whatever software you usually use.

Even if that’s all it did, it would be worth having. The quality is unsurpassed, matched only by DxO Photo Lab. 

In fact, you don’t even have to fire up Lightroom or Pure Raw to use it. Instead, you can run it direct from your PC’s file explorer:

All the basic options are available. It really couldn’t be easier.

Advanced Options

Of course, there’s more to DxO Pure RAW 5 that this. Click ‘Process With Preview’ to use the advanced options:

What options are available. Here’s a list of the main features:

• Select Noise Reduction Engine, with the new DeepPRIME 3 being the latest and greatest.
• Adjust Luminance and Detail to tune the noise reduction.
• Adjust Lens Sharpness* strength
• Select whether to remove Vignetting, Chromatic Aberrations, and Lens Distortion
• Create Layer Masks to control noise reduction and sharpening
• Choose output format(s)
  • DNG
  • TIF (8 and 16 bit)
  • JPEG

*One of DxO’s unique features and major strengths is its comprehensive database of camera + lens corrections. This is not a ‘one size fits all’ sharpening option. Rather, it is targeted to improving the way your lens performs on your camera. Not all images need noise reduction. But all digital images benefit from a little bit of sharpening during the RAW conversion stage. DxO’s unique approach guarantees the best possible result for your images.

The result

The DxO result is on the right. The trees are sharpened, but not over sharpened. At this stage in your RAW workflow, you want as pure an image as you can get, so that further adjustments don’t degrade your images. DxO has produced a clean, noise free, aberration free, subtly sharp image. Easy. No fuss.