DxO PhotoLab 10 In-Depth Review
The Best New Feature Is Buried in the Small Print
The battle for supremacy in the photo editor niche has been a three way race for some time now with Adobe Lightroom, Capture One and DXO Photolab vying for the attentions of the serious hobbyists and the professional photographers, with an increasing number of mid-tier, budget and even free apps fighting over the crumbs that fall off the top table.
But now in mid-2026, we find ourselves at an interesting point, where there is near feature-parity between those top tier apps and the developers have to go to ever greater lengths to distinguish their product from the other guy’s.
Adobe have increasingly focused their efforts on AI retouching tools, Capture One on studio photography features and DXO on pre-processing. Or to put it another way, Adobe have tried to make Lightroom all things to everyone, Capture One have tried to make their app all things to the pro’s, and DXO have built an app for the pixel-peepers.
But out of all the developers, DXO have the most to prove, with a flawed bug-ridden launch of Photolab 9 and then a slow and painful update process to correct a long list of serious issues.
Have they done it? Is Photolab 10 the RAW editor we were all willing it to be?
If I’m being honest, and you know I like to be honest, I think the most revolutionary thing about Photolab 10 is buried in the small print.
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Also published in RAW & Unfiltered on Substack.
