PureRAW lets you benefit from DxO’s PRIME denoising neural network, which indisputably is the best available, without having to buy a license for Photolab. With version 3, DxO has added the power of DeepPRIME XD that became available in Photolab 6 last year, which this magazine published a review of back then. As was already clear and in spite of this reviewer’s scepticism, DeepPRIME XD is capable of squeezing detail out of images that even you didn’t know was present in the image in the first place.
DxO originally positioned PureRAW as sort of a Trojan horse for its noise reduction system, and version 3 shows it’s time to move to the next step: offering more options and support for even more camera/lens combinations. To start with the latter: PureRAW 3 supports TransX sensors, making Fujifilm photographers as happy as the Bayer club. Phase one or Hasselblad cameras are still not supported, though.
It means most of us will rejoice in having access to more functionality in a vastly improved user interface. The UI is still as simple as they come, but version 3’s more intuitive than before. As before, you just drop images in the empty window, but once the photos have been listed and you click the “Process Now” button, a pop-up dialog lets you access other corrections besides DeepPrime, including Lens Sharpness, and Optical Corrections. You also now get to choose between JPEG, DNG and TIFF as export formats.
Furthermore, there’s an Add to Queue button that initiates a batch processing feature with the same options. I tried that one, checked every option in the pop-up, and found that my photos were cleaner than before, with more detail. However, a blue color cast in one of them wasn’t corrected perfectly, so I thought to have found a major point of criticism until I realized it is due to PureRAW correcting only those flaws that are hardware related.
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