DxO PhotoLab 7

Process your RAW files to perfection using AI-assisted denoising tools, downloadable optics modules and more. George Cairns tries out the latest pro Adobe alternative

Price: £209/$229
Website: dxo.com

The newly released PhotoLab 7 is the latest incarnation of DxO's powerful digital asset manager and photo editor. Like most Digital Asset Management (DAM) apps, PhotoLab 7 allows you to organise your digital images by assigning them colour labels, ratings and keywords that you can filter through to find specific files quickly and easily. You can select or reject shots with a click and even filter files by the information in their metadata. That means you can choose to display your images according to their ISO speed, for example, to help you find the 'noisiest' photos that are most in need of being fixed. And that's good news because PhotoLab 7 is particularly adept at smoothing out noise while preserving detail.

PhotoLab 7 is packed full of powerful digital darkroom tools and it uses a comprehensive collection of optics modules to quickly and effectively counteract lens artefacts, such as distortion, vignetting and chromatic aberration (colour fringing). These optic modules are particularly useful if you've been shooting in RAW formats for years because, thanks to the ongoing advancement in Al, you can give decades-old RAW files a new lease of life.