Currently I import directly from my Canon EOS 5D into Lightroom on my MacBook Pro. Most of my photo use is onscreen, although I'm intending to print in due course. I'm not a professional.

Since buying DxO Pro Elite a couple of months ago, I increasingly tend to use the "Edit in External Programme" option from within Lightroom - LR creates a Tiff and DxO works on that. I use DxO only for lens correction (24-105, 100-400, 100 macro) and very occasionally for perspective correction. Then I do sharpening, colour, cropping etc. back in Lightroom.

Now for the last couple of weeks I've also had Noise Ninja, prompted by getting the Canon G10. As with DxO, I use NN from within LR as an external programme.

All in all, I suspect that I now need to get a more systematic and consistent workflow process. Your suggestions and rationales will be much appreciated.

I open the RAW .CR2 in DXO and switch off everything except lens correction. I export a DNG from DXO which I import into LR to do all the adjustments. LR has some good sharpening controls so you can work on your DNG parametrically. I can then export the finished file as a TIFF. Worth a try?

Thank you. I guess you can check before / after in DxO? Or do you get your first view in LR?

I have found that the noise reduction in DXO is wonderful, as is the correction of geometric distortion. The "default" settings for these are actually based, frame by frame, on the Exif information in the files. What little noise DXO does not eliminate is reduced to a much "finer" type of noise that is really more like film grain. If I still need to work on the noise I use Dfine, after the conversion.

My workflow with DXO is as follows:

1) I ingest the images from the card reader with Lightroom. Since I don't use DXO for every image, I make a subfolder for those images that I want to use DXO for, and move them into the folder from Lightroom.

2) I open the freestanding version of DXO and point it at the subfolder, which includes images with noticeable noise or distortions. It also includes images that will not need difficult adjustments of color, tone, saturation, etc. For the images needing just noise and distortion adjustments, I select just those processes in DXO. For the others, I add modules from Light and Color that I want applied. I then process all of the images, having DXO convert them to DXO's version of DNG.

3) I open those in Lightroom and season to taste. (or in Bridge and then Camera RAW). I then convert these to Tiffs. Some my need further work in Photoshop and layers or various plug-ins.

You wanna see complex workflow? Try adding Photomatix HDR software to the mix!

This is certainly not the workflow that I would recommend, for the simple reason that DxO is a vastly superior RAW converter compared to LR/ACR, and you are not taking advantage of that fact when you do the RAW conversion in LR and export a TIFF to DxO. If you want nothing more than to correct lens distortion, you could more easily use PTLens. DxO also has excellent noise reduction which is done to the RAW file before demosaicisation, which is a real advantage.

Why not use DxO to do what it excels at doing?

Rob

I import everything into DxO first, convert to DNG and then when it has done it's thing, open up and import into LR. I do as much as I can in LR, but open up in PS and use Noise Ninja if I have a troublesome file.
Now, if only DxO worked in 64 bit!

At least it runs just fine on 64 bit Windows, including Windows 7.

That's true, it runs quite fine - but awfully bloody slow - I'd love the extra oomph of 64 bit.