Some are flaunting DxO Photolab 9 as a subscription-free Lightroom killer. But is this true? To find out, I have compared Lightroom and Photolab across five different dimensions, including price, photo management, photo editing, usability, and performance, to help you decide which is best for your needs. Jump to Conclusion
GET LIGHTROOM
LIGHTROOM ONLY
US$11.99
PER MONTH. INCLUDES 1TB STORAGE
GET PHOTOLAB
LIFETIME LICENSE
US$239
30-DAY REFUND POLICY
Lightroom vs DxO Photolab – Contents
Price
You can buy DxO Photolab 9 for a one-time payment of US$239. In contrast, Lightroom is subscription-only and will cost you at least US$120 each year for as long as you own it.
However, it will cost you $119 each time you upgrade your copy of DxO Photolab. Thus, if you were to upgrade each year, you would spend a total of $479.97 in the first three years of owning Photolab compared to just $359.65 subscribing to Lightroom for the same period. Furthermore, Lightroom includes 1TB of cloud storage, worth around $60 each year, whereas Photolab provides none. Therefore, Lightroom is the better deal for frequent upgraders or those with extensive photo collections.
Yet, depending on your use case, you could buy Photolab outright, skip on the upgrades, and not pay another cent for another five years. For this reason, Photolab is a good deal if you already have plenty of storage, no desire to chase the latest features, or the need for compatibility with the latest cameras and lenses. Try DxO Photolab for Free.
Winner: Depends
Photo Management
Adobe Lightroom’s Photo Management is top-tier and includes well-executed contemporary features such as AI-powered automatic keyword tagging and face recognition for your cloud-hosted images. Moreover, you will be able to access and edit your cloud-hosted photos via a wide range of Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android devices, making remote working and sharing your pictures with family, friends, and clients a breeze. Read Lightroom Review for more information.
Furthermore, there’s no longer a mandatory import. Thus, you can keep your images stored wherever you want on your own computer. However, locally stored images will not be able to take advantage of Lightroom’s Cloud-powered face recognition or automatic keyword tagging.
In comparison, DxO Photolab’s photo management is functional but basic. You can rate images, manually tag your photos with keywords, and assign groups of pictures to albums. Plus, you can search for photos using metadata properties such as date taken, iso, camera model, and many more. While basic, Photolab’s photo management works well enough. Yet, there is no automatic keyword tagging, face recognition, smartphone connectivity, or cloud integration. In other words, Lightroom is a vastly superior photo management tool. Try Lightroom for Free
Winner: Lightroom
Photo Editing
Lightroom and DxO Photolab are similarly capable when it comes to regular photo editing. For instance, both offer fine control over exposure, contrast, and color, as well as conveniences such as targeted adjustments and AI-powered masking. However, Lightroom has no equivalent to DxO’s labor-saving Smart lighting and ClearView Plus. Meanwhile, Lightroom features color grading, whereas Photolab is limited to split toning.
However, Photolab’s biggest asset is its optical module-powered raw conversions that profile the specific characteristics and flaws of your camera and lens combination to apply highly targeted corrections and enhancements. Meanwhile, Photolab’s DeepPRIME noise reduction is as good as noise reduction gets. Read DxO Photolab Review
In contrast, Lightroom’s raw conversion is undoubtedly good enough, and you may even prefer its aesthetic. Although Lightroom’s AI Denoise falls short of Photolab’s DeepPRIME noise reduction, you’ll still be impressed by what it can do.
Yet, Lightroom has a broader feature set than DxO Photolab. For example, Lightroom includes vastly more presets, an AI upscaler in Super Resolution, HDR merge, and a Panorama Stitching tool. Lightroom also contains an excellent portrait background blur tool, and one of the better generative AI erase brushes I’ve tested. While Photolab 9 offers AI object-selection masking, Lightroom goes further and delivers automatic people, sky, background, and subject masking. Overall, when it comes to photo editing, Lightroom does more.
Winner: Lightroom
Usability
Lightroom’s minimalistic interface is clear, concise, and welcoming to beginners. In contrast, DxO Photolab’s well-presented interface looks busy and intimidating. As a result, Lightroom is much easier to become acquainted with.
However, DxO Photolab’s user interface is widely customizable both in terms of layout and in being able to stack your favorite tools, whereas Lightroom is barely customizable at all. As a result, you can tune Photolab to accommodate your workflow rather than tuning your workflow to fit Lightroom.
Yet, despite different learning curves, both applications are ultimately straightforward, pleasant to use, and packed with labor-saving features such as automated raw conversions, presets, and targeted adjustments. However, Lightroom is forever out of sync with my preferred workflow, whereas my tuned copy of Photolab is not.
Winner: DxO Photolab
Performance
While Lightroom and DxO Photolab deliver similarly excellent performance overall, each suffers from unique problems. For instance, Lightroom’s preview is better able to keep up with your adjustments, while transitioning between tabs is faster in Photolab. Although Lightroom’s AI-powered feature set suffers from load times, Photolab lacks these features entirely.
Overall, both are great performers, but it’s always worth testing applications on your own hardware, using your own files, and measuring against your own expectations.
Conclusion
So, is DxO Photolab truly a Lightroom killer? Well, many users are likely to find Lightroom a better deal than DxO Photolab thanks to its vastly superior photo management, 1TB of cloud storage, and broader photo editing feature set. While its subscription fees may be a bit of a turn-off, Lightroom and its 1TB of storage can work out cheaper than paying for DxO Photolab and its periodical updates outright.
However, even if DxO Photolab proves more cost-effective for your use case, it lacks conveniences such as contemporary photo management, smartphone integration, a vast preset collection, AI upscaling, HDR, portrait background blur, generative AI erasing tools, and object recognition-powered masking.
But, if you can live without these features, DxO Photolab will reward you with top-tier raw conversion, best-in-class photo noise reduction, a highly responsive and customizable user interface, and perhaps, best of all, no subscription fees.
GET LIGHTROOM
LIGHTROOM ONLY
US$11.99
PER MONTH. INCLUDES 1TB STORAGE
GET PHOTOLAB
LIFETIME LICENSE
US$239
30-DAY REFUND POLICY
About the Author
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