The app then tweaks the shot’s exposure to prioritize details in the selected areas. After clicking the panel’s Spot Weighted button you can draw a marquee over the area (or areas) that are most important. PhotoLab 4’s Light panel has a useful Smart Lighting feature that does a similar job. Photographers often use spot metering to prioritize the exposure for a particular part of the scene (such as a bright sky or a building in shadow). You can also adjust a specific area using manual brushes, which enables you to selectively dodge (lighten) or burn (darken) particular areas with great precision (like an old school analogue dark room photographer), but PhotoLab also uses auto-masking 'control points' inherited from DxO's takeover of the Nik Collection.

One of most useful equalizer sliders is ClearView Plus (Elite edition only), which uses localised contrast adjustments to cut through atmospheric haze and give flat-looking pictures much more contrast. (Image credit: George Cairns/Digital Camera World) (opens in new tab)Īfter applying a selective adjustment you can tweak a range of properties via a clever multi-function equalizer that sits next to the area that you’re working on. Here we’re using ClearView Plus to claw back more detail in distant haze.

Local adjustments such as Control Points enable you to target a specific region and tweak a host of properties. This AI-assisted denoising operation certainly gives PhotoLab 4 the ‘wow factor’, though it's only available in the more expensive Elite version, along with other advanced features like DxO's ClearView (dehaze) tool.

Luminance noise was also smoothed out without losing key details. After a click on the Denoising Technologies panel’s DeepPRIME button the nasty color noise vanished. When viewed at 100% we could see garish specs of color noise in the unprocessed picture. This exposure enables the app to learn how to smooth out noise without sacrificing detail. To put DeepPRIME to the test we opened a Canon Raw file that had been captured using a high ISO of 800. PhotoLab 4’s DeepPRIME AI has been exposed to millions of images produced by many different camera and lens models.

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