A tool to incorporate DxO PureRaw in a Lightroom+Photoshop workflow
Updated on 2022, September 6
Note: the tool I present you in this article should not be necessary with PureRaw 2, released in 2022
In this article, I present to you a tool I discovered that helped me use Dxo PureRaw in my photography editing workflow.
Dxo PureRaw is a one-click raw file processing application, which mainly seems to focus on noise removal and sharpening. I was quite impressed by the noise management function: on a Canon 7D2 raw file taken at high ISO, noise magically disappeared. Even better, when subsequently raising shadows in Lightroom, no extra noise seemed to appear! I wasn’t completely convinced by the sharpening, I found my subjects to look a bit weird when seen up-close, but overall I found PureRaw to be beneficial to my photography, at least in some scenarios.
I won’t dwell more on the software’s functionalities, there are plenty of resources on the internet for that. What I want to show you is how to include PureRaw in your workflow if you like to do image culling and selection in Lightroom.
The problem occurs after you have selected the images you want to process. If you use a Mac, it’s fine, you can drag and drop the thumbnails from Lightroom to PureRaw, process them there, and then export back to Lightroom. However, that doesn’t work on Windows (yet?).
Enters the LRPureRAW plugin.
With it, you can export a number of images to PureRaw in just a few clicks.
1. In Lightroom, select the images.
2. Go to File/Export (Ctrl+Shift+E), and use the plugin. This will open your raw files in PureRaw.
3. Process the images in PureRaw.
4. In the dialog box that pops up, export the resulting images back to Lightroom.
Tada! Now you can continue with your usual workflow, for instance editing your photos in Lightroom and then Photoshop.
One thing to pay attention to: when exporting from Lightroom (step 2), make sure the Export Location (top section) is not your “My Pictures folder”. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to work. Personally, I like to create a subfolder in the repository that contains my RAW files.
Installation: this link has all the instructions. Note that your “home directory” should be something like C:/Users/<your-username>. Don’t hesitate to ask if you face problems!
Bonus tip: Dxo PureRaw creates .dng files from your raw files, and they are HUGE! If you use Photoshop, you will create an extra file anyway (.psd or .tiff), so you can remove the .dng files afterwards and save some hard drive space.
Note: the tool I present you in this article should not be necessary with PureRaw 2, released in 2022
In this article, I present to you a tool I discovered that helped me use Dxo PureRaw in my photography editing workflow.
Dxo PureRaw is a one-click raw file processing application, which mainly seems to focus on noise removal and sharpening. I was quite impressed by the noise management function: on a Canon 7D2 raw file taken at high ISO, noise magically disappeared. Even better, when subsequently raising shadows in Lightroom, no extra noise seemed to appear! I wasn’t completely convinced by the sharpening, I found my subjects to look a bit weird when seen up-close, but overall I found PureRaw to be beneficial to my photography, at least in some scenarios.
I won’t dwell more on the software’s functionalities, there are plenty of resources on the internet for that. What I want to show you is how to include PureRaw in your workflow if you like to do image culling and selection in Lightroom.
The problem occurs after you have selected the images you want to process. If you use a Mac, it’s fine, you can drag and drop the thumbnails from Lightroom to PureRaw, process them there, and then export back to Lightroom. However, that doesn’t work on Windows (yet?).
Enters the LRPureRAW plugin.
With it, you can export a number of images to PureRaw in just a few clicks.
1. In Lightroom, select the images.
2. Go to File/Export (Ctrl+Shift+E), and use the plugin. This will open your raw files in PureRaw.
3. Process the images in PureRaw.
4. In the dialog box that pops up, export the resulting images back to Lightroom.
Tada! Now you can continue with your usual workflow, for instance editing your photos in Lightroom and then Photoshop.
One thing to pay attention to: when exporting from Lightroom (step 2), make sure the Export Location (top section) is not your “My Pictures folder”. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to work. Personally, I like to create a subfolder in the repository that contains my RAW files.
Installation: this link has all the instructions. Note that your “home directory” should be something like C:/Users/<your-username>. Don’t hesitate to ask if you face problems!
Bonus tip: Dxo PureRaw creates .dng files from your raw files, and they are HUGE! If you use Photoshop, you will create an extra file anyway (.psd or .tiff), so you can remove the .dng files afterwards and save some hard drive space.