Who Is DxO Viewpoint 5 For

A non-reviewers quick overview of DxO Viewpoint 5

When I was sent my complimentary copy of DxO Viewpoint 5 a couple of weeks before its official release on October 15th, I was quite excited as it was the only one of DxO’s photo processing products I had never used.

After installing it and initially trying it out I decided to take a few steps back from it and try to work out how and where it would fit in with my style of photography, which I would best describe as generic, or all-encompassing.

Who is DxO Viewpoint 5 for?

Perhaps using the term all-encompassing is not actually correct as I don’t do any serious architectural photography, or real estate photography, and I don’t, as a matter of course, use super-wide angle lenses. Those three groups appear to me to be the primary user groups DxO is targeting with Viewpoint.

I have also seen several suggestions on the ‘net that it may be a useful tool for landscape photographers, but whether that is because landscape photographers use wide-angle lenses, or whether it’s because of some of Viewpoint’s other features I’m not sure.

DxO’s own website says Viewpoint 5 offers “..ultimate control over geometry, shape, and perspective…“, and Digital Camera World says “DxO ViewPoint 5 could be the software you never thought you needed”.

So, earlier this week, after “sitting on” Viewpoint 5 for a week or two, I decided to dive in and see what it could do, and more specifically, see what it could do for me, and also try to work out who DxO Viewpoint 5 is for.

Dxo Viewpoint 5 runs happily as a stand-alone app, and it also integrates cleanly with Photolab and other apps, but I decided for this non-review to run it as a standalone app.

The first thing I noticed (as will all other users) is that Viewpoint can handle only JPEGs and TIFFs. There is no RAW file support. Is this a big deal? Well Yes…and No.

It’s Yes if you want to take advantage of DxO’s highly accurate lens correction features…and it’s also Yes if the JPEGs and TIFFs don’t have the appropriate camera/lens metadata to identify and download the appropriate optical modules, in which case you are prompted to download the original image file.

But it’s a No if you are happy to make all adjustments manually, and forgo DxO’s legendary automatic lens correction.

For my “testing” I stuck to JPEGs, and I’m happy to share some of the results here.

First up is an example of Viewpoint’s auto-perspective correction capability applied to an over-tilted Dutch tilt image.

No lens correction was downloaded/used was used, and just one click inside DxO Viewpoint 5 is all it took to straighten/level the original badly tilted out-of-camera image. Very impressive!

Here is another pair of images showing Viewpoint’s capabilities.

In this case Viewpoint automatically identified the DxO optical module needed for lens correction and prompted me to download and install it, which I did. Lens correction was applied, then the Auto perspective control button clicked.

When I took the original photo I deliberately kept the tower as close to vertical as possible, resulting in the road sloping to the left. DxO Viewpoint has done a fine job of levelling the road, and straightening the verticals in the main block of the old church, while also doing a good job of retaining the tower vertical with only a hint of a bit of lean to the left.

Incidentally the Unrestrained auto crop setting was used here.

It is this type of situation where the Reshape Fusion tool in Viewpoint can be used to fine tune the verticals.

Reshape Fusion is, for want of a better term, a warping tool which allows fine adjustment of any part of the image – horizontal or vertical or anything in between. I tried it and decided it requires a real knack to get it right, even with a choice of grids overlaid on the image for guidance.

Manual geometry adjustment

The next three images show an attempt to correct verticals, somewhat unsuccessfully, using Viewpoints’s force verticals parallel manual adjustment.

The tower is leaning backwards and the sides are not parallel – as is to be expected using this angle of view.

Sure – the tower is now upright and the cupola looks like it’s close to the correct perspective – but the tower’s skinny appearance is not right.

The Reshape Fusion tool allows you to “warp” the image to correct perspective. It’s not quick, and it is quirky, as care is needed when adjusting the grid to make sure that as you adjust the position of one part of the image, another part is not pulling the wrong way and becoming distorted.

The screenshot above shows the grid overlaid on the water tower image. Several segments of the grid can be selected to form one larger segment, then that segment can be manipulated for best effect. Or, individual parts of the grid can be selected and moved independently of all others.

The finer the grid, the finer the level of control you have.

From the small amount of time I spent using Reshape Fusion I have learnt that it has the potential to be an incredibly powerful tool, which when used in conjunction with the other perspective tools, can give very good and satisfying results.

But – be warned – it seems to me that there is quite a learning curve, and a lot of practice needed, to get on top of the quirky nature of Reshape Fusion.

There is one function in DxO Viewpoint 5 that will be of tremendous value to photographers who use wide angle lenses a lot – and that is Volume Deformation correction – or more correctly anamorphosis. That’s my big, new word for today.

Anamorphosis is distortion that happens with wide-angle lenses when subjects near the edges of the image get stretched more than those near the centre of the image. Yes – I did look that up! I haven’t tested the Volume Deformation correction myself, but it is a “one” click” tool that can be used to correct horizontal/vertical deformation or diagonal deformation.

In all honesty it’s all a bit beyond me.

With DxO Viewpoint 5 it’s a small world

One final tool in Viewpoint’s toolbox that might be useful to everyday photographers is the Miniature Effect tool. In basic terms this is an effect added to an image to draw a viewer’s attention to a specific part of an image by creating an artificial depth of field which fools the brain into thinking that the sharp subject in the image appears to be smaller than it really is.

Perhaps the example I have chosen – Overlooking the Whanganui River – is either not the best to illustrate the miniature effect, or I haven’t balanced the foreground blur correctly with the background blur. It would appear that this effect is best used on subjects viewed from a rather high angle, and seems to work best on buildings, cars, people and the like rather than on landscapes.

It seems a little strange to include this tool as the miniature effect in a package targeting architectural and real estate photographers, as it feels more like a gimmick to me.

The feature image for this story has had the miniature effect applied.

My summary

In summary DxO Viewpoint is a powerful geometry and perspective correction tool that is, I feel, more targeted at specialist areas of photography such as architecture, real estate and perhaps wide-angle lens users.

Most photography processing apps will already have their own built in geometry and perspective controls. Photolab 8, for example, has Perspective controls that offer many of the same features as Viewpoint, and when the Perspective settings are combined with the Horizon, Deformation and Crop tools, the only things missing are Reshape Fusion and the Miniature Effect. The primary benefit of using Viewpoint with Photolab is that it provides a non-destructive workflow, that can handle RAW files.

In On1 Photo RAW the Transform tool does the same/similar job, and of course there used to be a Perspective app in the Nik Collection up until version 7.

So what are the pros and cons of DxO Viewpoint 5?

Right – going back to Digital Camera World’s comment that “DxO ViewPoint 5 could be the software you never thought you needed“, well I never thought I needed it – and I don’t!

Again – thanks to DxO for supplying me with an advance copy of DxO Viewpoint 5.