DxO Photolab 9

Black-backed Kingfisher, Thailand, OM System OM-1 II, OM 150-400mm/4.5 IS TC (400mm), ISO 2500, f/4.5, 1/125s
completely processed with DxO Photolab 9

It’s here! Major update of DxO PhotoLab RAW editor

Autumn is back, and with it the traditional wave of new features in RAW editing software. The award-winning DxO PhotoLab has reached version 9—and it’s arrived in great shape! I mean that sincerely and independently of the fact that, for the third time, one of my photos appears on DxO’s splash screens. This time, my hummingbirds are joined by Maikong from Brazil’s Pantanal.

Disclaimer: As a professional photographer, I try to test new tech both in the field and in post. Not because I have to, but because I genuinely enjoy it. The text below reflects my personal views and real-world experience using DxO PhotoLab 9 on my own images—regardless of my collaboration with DxO. I’d been a happy user of their software long before they invited me to test and provide feedback. I take that as an honor I truly value; still, I don’t feel my opinions about how the program works are influenced by it. I always place my thoughts in the context of my day-to-day work. It’s perfectly normal if some of my priorities feel trivial to you—that’s totally fine. Before buying any software or gear, always test whether it suits your needs and expectations. Those can differ a lot from what a long-time satisfied user—or a random passer-by reviewer—might present.

What is DxO PhotoLab 9?

Simply put, DxO PhotoLab 9 is software for managing and editing photos (especially RAW). The “9” tells you this is a well-established program that’s been standing proudly alongside the likes of Lightroom (LR) and Capture One (CO) for nine seasons now. In my view, PhotoLab 9 is a kind of turning point for DxO—but more on that in a moment. How do you actually choose the right photo editor? After coming home from a shoot, we want to see our photos on a monitor as sharp as possible, free of optical defects, with realistic color and exposure. Unlike JPGs, RAW data doesn’t have a single interpretation, and different apps handle it differently. At first glance, all editors might look similar—you find a photo in the library and tweak brightness and color in the edit module—but in practice they differ in many user-relevant details. That’s why there’s no single “objectively best” program. From experience, I’d look at three right now: Capture One (my current choice; I’ve used it actively for about eight years), Adobe Lightroom (I used it for 12 years before CO, and still use it for certain tasks), and DxO PhotoLab (quite possibly my future choice?).

In PhotoLab 9, you can significantly customize panels—show/hide, order them left/right, and build your own workflow.

It’s hard to describe “quality” because it blends lots of interdependent factors. It’s not just a dry list of features—working with the app has to fit you, just like choosing camera gear. So I’ll describe what’s new and why it helps from my perspective, fully aware that my priorities may be marginal to someone else. As I write this, I work daily in Capture One with tens of thousands of photos where I need order and clarity. I rarely process in big batches; I pick what I feel like working on. Besides editing, I often browse my archive to temporarily sort images for talks, articles, and video courses. I lean heavily on both fixed and custom folder structures, so-called Albums or Projects. To speed things up, I use a bunch of custom keyboard shortcuts so I can operate the mouse with one hand and select tools with the other on the left side of the keyboard. For top-tier noise reduction I’ve used DxO PureRAW for years (see my video). It removes noise brilliantly while keeping sharpness, so we’re no longer limited by high ISO. On selected images I therefore work with the resulting DNG. That’s why I’m focusing on new features that materially affect how I work—speeding things up, making them more efficient, while preserving full control over the final look.

Key feature for my workflow—precise AI selections. Can you guess which one-click selection came from Adobe Lightroom, DxO PhotoLab 9, and Capture One?

I’ve had PhotoLab on my radar since version 1, and it has moved forward a lot. You could say it’s been paving the way to today’s version 9, which I consider the most significant yet. DxO’s lens/body profiles are superbly tuned to squeeze maximum quality out of practically any combo you can think of—there are now over 100,000 profiles in their database. The Customize module houses all the basic and advanced editing tools, several of which are unique here (ClearView, Smart Lighting, Denoising, …). That last one—Denoising—is essentially what you get with DxO PureRAW. If you use PhotoLab, you don’t need to buy PureRAW: this denoising is built right in. Before diving into what’s new, you can check my YouTube video explaining how PhotoLab works and what PhotoLab 8 brought. I mention things I love and things I miss—you can compare that with what v9 adds. Go ahead, have a look; I’ll wait here with the PL9 goodies.

DxO Photolab 9 – Photo Library (image management)

Great, welcome back—let’s go. Listing all features would take forever. From my perspective, the design is excellent and the app feels great in use. Instead of cataloging (importing) photos, PhotoLab works directly with your disk folders. It’s a clean approach, though with some trade-offs. The UI has two main parts—Photo Library (photo management) and Customize (photo editing). In Photo Library, you can browse, rate with stars or colors, filter easily, and build Projects (collections independent of your disk structure). New in PL9: batch renaming, plus stacking photos by capture time—or manually by subject. You can mark favorite folders and pull them out of the main structure for faster access, which saves time. What I still sorely miss when browsing is the ability to view photos in subfolders—you have to drill down all the way to the last subfolder. I won’t go deeper here; that could fill many pages. Overall, the look, panels, and options in Photo Library are top-tier, and I only need a few small things to feel fully at home. The big fireworks happened in editing—so let’s go there.

Example of the Photo Library module: collapsed/expanded stacks, color labels, folder structure, and EXIF view.

DxO Photolab 9 – Customize (image editing)

PL8 introduced several major features, further developed in v9. DxO’s DeepPRIME XD/XD2s denoising is, in my opinion, currently at the very top among available tools. I ran a broad comparison not long ago, and DxO still dominates. A downside in prior PhotoLab versions was that you couldn’t work on a fully denoised image—you only had a preview. PL8 added a loupe that showed a much larger denoise preview than the tiny ones before. PL9 finally goes all-in and lets you apply denoising to the entire image while editing! It’s computationally heavier and will vary by machine. On my Mac mini M4, loading a denoised image takes about five seconds. After that, I see a beautifully cleaned image and can keep working. This is seriously great. The loupe is still there, but if you have a fast computer, I recommend processing the whole image. It’s a new dimension—noise practically disappears from your workflow. You’re working directly on a top-quality image without bouncing through external apps or creating new denoised DNGs. The file’s ready to go—and we’ve only just opened it. Another PL8 feature taken further is layers. You can combine selections and, crucially, use the new AI selections. Finally! Let’s be honest: this was necessary—Adobe and Capture One both have mature AI selection tools, and DxO needed to catch up. So how does PL9 do? Great! There’s room to grow, but it’s strong already.

What do we get in AI selection tool? Three tools:

+ Add selection (hover to auto-detect what’s under the cursor; click to confirm),
+ Add area (drag a rectangle to define a region), and
+ Auto-detect subjects, specifically: sky, subject, background | people, animals, flowers, vehicles | hair, faces, clothes.

The plurals matter: when selecting subjects, all animals or all plants are detected and selected. Picking a hummingbird at a flower has rarely been easier. You can rename, duplicate, and invert layers, and combine their selections with other methods. Personally, about 90% of my local edits now start with AI selections. The question is—how good are they?

Example of the editor and Local Adjustments panel; the bottom row shows AI selection tools including the subject list for automatic detection.

The quality of AI selections in DxO PhotoLab 9

This is worth calling out. It’s not enough to just have the feature and make it look similar to others. The precision differs among LR, CO, and PL. After lots of testing across dozens of images, I can confirm that, for me, PL9 delivers the best AI selections of the three. PhotoLab 9 most often understood what I wanted and nailed it precisely. It showed most clearly on birds in flight: LR and CO tend to include the spaces between spread primaries, and you have to fix that. DxO gets it right in one click, which saves real time (yes—the third, most accurate mask in the eagle-quiz up top is from DxO PhotoLab 9!). What I miss compared to the others is a refinement tool for the selection edge. Of course, you can add to or subtract from a selection. But if the final edge doesn’t blend as I want, there’s no Refine or Feather slider. I’d love that. The only slider we have right now is Opacity. Hopefully it’ll come—because even though DxO’s AI selections are extremely precise, when things do go a bit off there’s no tool to fine-tune the blend. One of the new goodies is that the beloved Control Point (CP) gained a Diffusion slider (softens the edge). What it still astonishingly lacks is the ability to morph the typically circular CP into an ellipse. The now-ubiquitous radial selection is missing in PhotoLab! You can partly work around it by tweaking CP, but it’s not the same. Ironically, the same tool in DxO Nik Collection (see my video) has this feature. Likewise, in an otherwise great layer/mask system, I miss a dedicated global adjustment layer—i.e., a layer that targets the whole image without requiring a selection. You can hack it by adding a gradient starting outside the image (see the PL8 video above), but again—not ideal. There is another local-edit upgrade: you can now denoise and sharpen locally. If you’re not fully happy with global denoising, you can boost or reduce noise locally, sharpen other areas, and squeeze the absolute max out of a file. For me, local edits and layers are now almost perfect; I’m hopeful we won’t have to wait a whole year for a true global-adjustment layer and a full radial filter—maybe they’ll land in an interim update.

Example of an AI selection; layers with custom names on the top right; Opacity under the layer list.

DxO PhotoLab 9 – headline new features

I’ve liked PhotoLab from the very start, and I consider v9’s additions genuinely revolutionary for the app’s evolution. Pretty much everything new has a direct impact on improving your workflow. If you’re on an older PhotoLab and wondering about upgrading—even from PL8—my answer is a clear yes. Here’s a bullet list of the biggest changes:

Photo Library (management)

Photo Stacking by time or content—super useful
iPhone photo support, including RAW
Favorite folders—time-saver for frequently used locations
Batch rename—well-designed and genuinely handy

Customize (editing)

DeepPRIME XD2s on the FULL image while editing—the loupe was a good idea, but this is the real deal; browsing any ISO virtually noise-free is a new dimension
AI selections—for users of older versions, this alone justifies the upgrade; it’s a true game-changer
Layers—duplicate/invert selections and blend them with a maximalist approach
Local noise/sharpening fine-tuning
Diffusion for Control Point—great for softening transitions… but still no ellipse
Copy edits across photos while preserving AI selections that adapt per image

DxO PhotoLab 9 – will I switch from Capture One?

Is PhotoLab 9 the best editor for wildlife images? For many, no doubt. For me personally? Almost there. It’s getting very close. Honestly, I’ve grown so fond of the new version during testing that I’m currently using a hybrid approach: for heavier catalog work I still use Capture One; when it’s time to edit, I open PhotoLab 9 and do the complete processing there. That way I skip the PureRAW DNG step, see the image denoised immediately, and leverage excellent local AI selections plus lots of refined tools. Sounds a bit crazy, but there are still a few things missing that keep me from going all-in—despite the fact that I really enjoy the vast majority of tools. Here’s what I’d need addressed to switch fully. Am I asking too much?

Photo Library (management)

No subfolder view—this really hurts. Say I’m prepping a talk from all my Pantanal trips: I’d love to click the PANTANAL folder and instantly see all photos from all trips, filter to TIFFs, and boom—my current top edits appear. Toss them into a “Pantanal talk” Project and the base is done in a minute. Right now, I’m forced to dig through ~60 subfolders and pick the TIFFs manually—20 minutes of work and a million clicks. Selecting images across a year for a calendar? A book? A nightmare. My “Jara Cimrman’s step aside” workaround is to replicate my folder structure into Projects, then proceed as usual (create a Project Group as the main structure and add Projects = image folders). That gives me exactly the view I want—but it’s unnecessary labor that could take hours in my archive, and it should be automatable. I can imagine a simple new tool like “Create Project Synchro Group” syncing folders from disk starting at X with auto-sync. It would mirror the disk exactly and allow subfolders overview. The lack of such a too really gets me!
No system-level EXIF filters—you can filter by colors, stars, etc., but filtering, say, “Ecuador, 150–400mm, ISO 6400–10000,” or “Borneo with flash” just isn’t possible. You can type EXIF filters manually and scan across folders—so it’s oddly possible there! Compared with filtering in Capture One, or especially Lightroom, this feels complicated, dated, and not workable for me.
Custom keyboard shortcuts—there are tons of shortcuts, but many don’t align with other apps. Some tools are only accessible with chorded combos, and the most common action—switching between Library and Customize—requires a three-key chord (Opt+Cmd+1 / Opt+Cmd+2), i.e., two hands. That’s a non-starter. Why not G/D like Lightroom, or G/G like my Capture One setup? Let us remap—personal shortcut freedom speeds up work significantly.
Manual photo ordering in Projects – Photos inside Projects can be sorted by various parameters, just like in folders. However, it’s not possible to create a custom order. This is something I use a lot when preparing lectures or print collections, as it gives me an overview of how the images flow one after another. The lack of this option unnecessarily limits the use of Projects (your own custom photo structure).

Customize (editing)

Background color switching—I often edit on a white canvas (like social feeds and most walls my prints hang on), but switch to black for night shots to check true blacks. In most apps: right-click on the canvas and pick a shade of gray you like. In PhotoLab you have to go Menu → Settings → Display. Extra clicks; right-click would be elegant and fast solution.
Short sliders—they span –100/+100 but are physically short (only about 2.5 cm on my 27″ monitor). Mouse movement is jumpy. If most tweaks fall within let say –25/+25, that’s only ~3 mm to either side—micro-movements that get tiring. Unlike other panels in the app (and other editors), you can’t widen the adjustments panel to lengthen/soften the sliders. For reference, my Capture One sliders are ~6.5 cm by default (and can go way longer), so a ±25 move is ~10 mm—hitting precise values is ~300% easier. Implementing resizable sliders shouldn’t be too hard.
Missing radial filter—I don’t get this, since the same company’s DxO Nik Collection lets you make elliptical shapes with the same Control Point concept. With the new Diffusion and Chroma/Luma handles, CP behaves similar to radial filter—except it’s forced to be circular. Ellipses would make PhotoLab arguably the most complete editor for RAW selections and masking, because in many respects its current selection options already stand out from the competition.
AI selection tool could be simpler—I’d love to merge Add selection and Add area into one tool: while hovering, I can pick what AI suggests; if I don’t like it, I drag to define a region. Capture One/Photoshop does it this way and it’s very intuitive. I’d also like to refine/extend AI selections within a single layer by clicking—without having to build sub-layers manually.
Subject icons for AI detection—Personally, the dropdown subject selection isn’t my favorite. If the bottom row had, say, 10 icons for the 10 detection types, I could just click them, see what’s active via a highlight, and add/remove as needed. Merging the two “Add” tools plus removing the dropdown would even free up space for future icons.
No edge refinement on AI masks—as precise as they are, sometimes the blend isn’t quite right. Beyond Opacity, there’s no Refine or Feather. You have to fix it with a brush, which erodes the time savings.
Missing global-adjustment layer—layers are addictive and neatly separate steps. But to use them, you first need a selection. You can’t select “entire image,” so I hack it by creating a gradient that starts outside the frame to cover the whole picture. Cleaner would be an explicit “global” layer. Otherwise, you have to leave layers, do a base edit, then come back.

DxO PhotoLab 9 in practice

To be clear: I find all of PhotoLab 9’s new features highly beneficial. If I were any older version user, I wouldn’t hesitate to upgrade—especially for full-image denoising on load and the polished AI selections, which aren’t just present—they’re executed masterfully. If future updates bring the few things I’m missing, I’ll pack my bags, leave Capture One, and adopt PhotoLab as my main management and editing tool. I’m excited for what’s next and hopeful my feedback helps. In the meantime, I’m genuinely enjoying PhotoLab 9. Huge thanks to DxO for letting me use the program months in advance and maybe help push it forward with my feedback. If you’re looking for software to manage and edit photos; you’re not blocked by the issues I listed; and you want a clear, feature-packed editor with excellent output and minimal noise—paid once, no monthly subscription—then give DxO PhotoLab 9 a try. From where I’m standing, it’s almost perfect already. But nothing beats personal experience—so definitely grab the TRIAL and test it on your own photos and computer. If you’d like to support my work, I’ll really appreciate it if you use my affiliate links when downloading the TRIAL or BUYING any DxO product—you’ll find them by simply clicking the TRIAL / BUY links. Thanks so much for reading; and if you’ve got a little time left, check out the video below to see how DxO PhotoLab 9’s new features behave in practice.

It’s here! Major update of DxO PhotoLab RAW editor

What is DxO PhotoLab 9?

DxO Photolab 9 – Photo Library (image management)

DxO Photolab 9 – Customize (image editing)

The quality of AI selections in DxO PhotoLab 9

DxO PhotoLab 9 – headline new features

Photo Library (management)

Customize (editing)

DxO PhotoLab 9 – will I switch from Capture One?

Photo Library (management)

Customize (editing)

DxO PhotoLab 9 in practice

DXO PHOTOLAB 9 – MY IMPRESSIONS

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