You Can Grab a Copy of DxO Optics Pro 8 Completely Free for a Limited Time
Between now and January 31st of 2015, those interested in switching up your post-processing workflow and experimenting with software outside of the Adobe ecosystem have a great incentive to do so: DxO has partnered with Digital Photographer to offer free, no strings attached licenses of DxO Optics Pro 8 to anybody who wants one.
Of course, DxO Optics Pro is currently well into Version 9, but if you’ve never played around with the software and you’re not keen on downloading a 31-day free trial of 9, this is a great way to add a piece of software to your workflow free of charge.
The plan, we imagine, is to get you hooked on some of the benefits of DxO over Lightroom ahead of the Version 10 release, which shouldn’t be far away.
As for what those benefits are, the 2012 webinar above from DxO Labs goes into great details, but Reddit user GloriousDawn (who has been using DxO since Version 5 and LR since Version 2) gave a good TL;DR in a recent thread:
DxO also requires a heavy computing platform, but its remaining strength is batch processing. I prefer the LR interface to edit a single picture, but if you need a hundred pictures to look nice and don’t have the time to tweak them individually, DxO is the way to go.
He also mentions that the ‘PRIME noise reduction’ feature in DxO Optics Pro 9 is “light-years ahead of LR” (you can see a noise reduction comparison here) but of course, that’s not something you’ll be getting out of this free Version 8.
Head over to DxO’s giveaway page to take advantage of this deal for yourself, and be ready to hand over your email address in exchange for the freebie.
