DXO Won't read my A900 ARW

[bakubo]

DxO is so buggy they should be paying us to use it instead of the other way around. Their copy protection is problematic (see my earlier thread) and this is for a program that is full of bugs.

[dennismullen]

DxO is so buggy they should be paying us to use it instead of the other way around. Their copy protection is problematic (see my earlier thread) and this is for a program that is full of bugs.

DxO v6.1.1 is much nicer. It seems their support for Macs is not as fast. The new Windows interface is better then v5.
I don't know why you're having problems with the copy protection, it's perfectly transparent to me.

Once you get used to it, it works with ACR and Photoshop smoothly.
I love how it corrects my Sigma 12-24 and how it improves high ISO shots.

Who knows, Light Room v3 may make it redundant.

Cheers,

[bakubo]

I don't know why you're having problems with the copy protection, it's perfectly transparent to me.

See my post below. I tried 6.1.1 and new problems cropped up. Also, if you look at posts from other people in this thread it is clear that Dx0 is chock full of bugs. Glad you like it though.

[Mike-Photos]

I don't know why you're having problems with the copy protection, it's perfectly transparent to me.

See my post below. I tried 6.1.1 and new problems cropped up. Also, if you look at posts from other people in this thread it is clear that Dx0 is chock full of bugs. Glad you like it though.

I'm also having almost no issues with DxO, and I like it a lot. Unlike Dennis, I'm finding that most of the time I can go straight from DxO to JPG (NR and sharpening are that good), and that more than makes up for the slower product. In fact, if I would add the time my NR and sharpening plug-ins take to do the same job as DxO, I'm spending much less time on post-processing at the moment.

If you take high ISO shots, and/or your lenses are supported in DxO, it's well worth the effort to try and get it running.

BTW, I enjoy your photos, your blog, and your lifestyle!

[bakubo]

I'm also having almost no issues with DxO, and I like it a lot. Unlike Dennis, I'm finding that most of the time I can go straight from DxO to JPG (NR and sharpening are that good), and that more than makes up for the slower product. In fact, if I would add the time my NR and sharpening plug-ins take to do the same job as DxO, I'm spending much less time on post-processing at the moment.

If you take high ISO shots, and/or your lenses are supported in DxO, it's well worth the effort to try and get it running.

Of course, there are many people who run DxO without problems. I have had multiple major problems with multiple versions though and have yet to even be able to try it on a single image. If DxO support ever gets back to me (it has been 3 days now) then I may finally be able to try it out, but since the end of year discount expires today they have definitely lost a sale. I may look at them again in the future when/if they get their major software problems fixed. I did searching on the internet and found that many people seem to have problems with their program. I was a software engineer for a few decades. I know crappy software when I see it. Too bad because clearly they have some interesting science and intellectual property buried in some bad software. They desperately need to get some people who know how to write software on board, IMO.

BTW, I enjoy your photos, your blog, and your lifestyle!

Thanks, Mike. I got back to Japan a few days ago and am now little by little going through the trip photos and working on a few to put on my photo website. I am being slowed down though by, what I think, is a pinched nerve in my neck which has caused pain all down my right arm. It just started my last day in Egypt, but was so mild then I gave it no thought. It has been getting progressively worse though and is now quite worrying. I hope it works itself out on its own. If not, then I may need to visit a doctor here.

[bakubo]

BTW, I enjoy your photos, your blog, and your lifestyle!

Speaking of lifestyle, here are couple of good websites:

http://www.retireearlyhomepage.com/

http://retireearlylifestyle.com/

The second one is run by my friends Billy and Akaisha -- we met them in Chiang-mai, Thailand a couple of years ago.

[vincenzo]

Bad news for me. See below for DXO Response:

"There is no bug in the program. Photo Mechanic is changing image information that Optics Pro needs to work correctly. This is why the images from the camera work, and the images that go through Photo Mechanic do not work. In all of our user guides and tutorials, we stress that Optics Pro must be the first program used in any post-production workflow, unless we have plug-ins to allow otherwise. Currently the only plug-ins we have are for Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom.

Unfortunately, we have no way of correcting what was done by Photo Mechanic so these image can work in Optics Pro.

Other program utilize the image data differently, and do not require as much precision in this data as does Optics Pro. Without this precision, we cannot offer the corrections our program offers.

The only supported workflow is to only use image files that come directly from the camera card, unless you use the Photoshop or Lightroom plug-ins."

[Mike-Photos]

BTW, I enjoy your photos, your blog, and your lifestyle!

Speaking of lifestyle, here are couple of good websites:

http://www.retireearlyhomepage.com/

http://retireearlylifestyle.com/

The second one is run by my friends Billy and Akaisha -- we met them in Chiang-mai, Thailand a couple of years ago.

Thanks Henry!

[bakubo]

Photo Mechanic is changing image information that Optics Pro needs to work correctly. This is why the images from the camera work, and the images that go through Photo Mechanic do not work. In all of our user guides and tutorials, we stress that Optics Pro must be the first program used in any post-production workflow, unless we have plug-ins to allow otherwise.

That is too bad. DxO depends on getting info from the file's meta data to determine things like camera, lens, focal length, aperture, and probably several other pieces of important info in order to do camera/lens specific corrections. It seems like there are several plausible scenarios with regards to using some software before DxO:

1. The other software changed some of the meta data for it's own use.
2. The other software deleted some of the meta data.
3. The other software corrupted some of the meta data.

Apparently, DxO is somehow able to detect that the meta data is not pristine. I wonder how they do that? DxO could, and probably should, provide an option that allows you to tell it that it is okay to go ahead and open a raw file because you know that the other software didn't change the meta data. Another option that would also be good is to be able to tell DxO to go ahead and open the raw file, but don't rely on the meta data and just do a "generic" conversion.

Since DxO puts such demands on the user such that no other software can precede it then we have every right to expect that DxO also doesn't muck around with the meta data. Maybe you should ask them that.

[vincenzo]

Kirk Baker, Senior software engineer at camera bits, makers of Photo Mechanic has looked at this issue. He says:

" I can almost guarantee that DXO's experts did not even look into the issue. I compared your two sample files and I know for a fact that the image data is not scrambled. The image data is absolutely unchanged. The only thing Photo Mechanic did was relocate the TIFF table (at offset 4 in the file is an offset to where the TIFF table starts and usually has the value of 8, meaning that the TIFF table starts at offset eight) and add some extra metadata. It is likely that the engineers at DXO wrote their parser to just read the start of the file and expect that the TIFF table is there but follow the TIFF table offset and use it. Unfortunately if they don't seek in the file to that offset and read that data into memory and instead just use it as an offset into uninitialized memory then they would get results like you see in their application. I'm surprised their software doesn't crash when reading these files.

Hopefully they can make the small change that would be necessary to follow the offset to the TIFF table, or just ignore it and use the original unaltered TIFF table that starts at offset 8. Either method would solve the problem."

For full details please see the thread here: http://forums.camerabits.com/index.php?topic=4026.0

[bakubo]

This is yet more evidence that the software is poor. That is really a very basic thing (using the embedded offset) and what they are doing is an amateur (poor amateur at that) mistake. It is really a shame that they don't have good software people to implement their technology. Glad I didn't buy. I'll try to check back from time to time to see if they have done a redesign/rewrite. I wonder if they have even hired real software developers to write their product? Maybe it is a bunch of scientists whose specialty is other stuff who have written it. Sure sounds like it to me. I have seen this sort of thing before when electrical engineers and other non-software people wrote software. Sadly, I have also seen it a few times by software developers too.

[vincenzo]

Certainly Kirk from PM agrees with you, while DXO take the opposite view:

"When the original file information we need is changed, or even shifted by a single byte, the process to extract the information Optics Pro needs from the image file can fail. We use precise file information provided to us by the camera manufacturers. Therefore, when the information in the file no longer follows their specifications, that can cause issues. And yes, our developers have investigated this issue in the past.

If other programs want to absolutely insure that no changes are made to image files that they use, one suggestion would be that they follow the Adobe model. Adobe allows their customers to write any changes made to an image file to a sidecar file. Therefore, the original file is left in the exact same state as it came from the camera. Adobe does this with their .xmp files, and it allows our customers to successfully use files that have been used in programs such as Adobe Bridge." Geoff DXO Support

[David Kilpatrick]

The whole point of PM is that it can embed copyright data, IPTC caption data, change timestamp and renumber or name images to avoid conflicting filenames. To do so, it must access the EXIF fields in the raw file. It can not do this using an .XMP sidecar file.

Also, ACR does not ever alter the original raw. It either writes into a sidecar file, or into an ACR database - not into the original raw.

David

[bakubo]

Certainly Kirk from PM agrees with you, while DXO take the opposite view:

"When the original file information we need is changed, or even shifted by a single byte, the process to extract the information Optics Pro needs from the image file can fail. We use precise file information provided to us by the camera manufacturers. Therefore, when the information in the file no longer follows their specifications, that can cause issues. And yes, our developers have investigated this issue in the past.

If other programs want to absolutely insure that no changes are made to image files that they use, one suggestion would be that they follow the Adobe model. Adobe allows their customers to write any changes made to an image file to a sidecar file. Therefore, the original file is left in the exact same state as it came from the camera. Adobe does this with their .xmp files, and it allows our customers to successfully use files that have been used in programs such as Adobe Bridge." Geoff DXO Support

This is pure hogwash. They have code that doesn't work properly and rather than fix it they are shifting blame around. It was the same with the DEP/software protection problem that I had with DxO. Maybe they just don't understand the issues which is also an indication that they really need to get professionals in there to write their software.

[InTheSky]

I really hope DXO can improve the stability of their programme because I'm getting superb results from it, especially higher ISO A900 shots which are often very useable up to 6400 compared to unusable at same ISO setting with rival programmes

Take a moment to try the new Lightroom Beta 3 ... Even if there is no control yet to manage the noise reduction, the basic result offer with the software looks very good so far. It think Beta 3 will bring back a lot of Sony user to this super and very fast way a processing batch images.

ISO 6400:

http://www.pbase.com/nadeauf/image/120267194/original

On my side, my Credit card is waiting to order the official version once it is available.

Regards,

Frank