Desperately need help with DxO Pur RAW

I am having two mega issues with DxO Pur Raw. I like what it can do and if I could get it to work, it would be a real time saver, but it is useless to me until these issues are resolved and so far no answer from DxO tech support.


 First, I am losing all my detailed caption info and contact info that I have painstakingly entered even from files I have not run through PR and am now finding that DxO is stripping all my caption info from my RAW files, even though I have not even processed. In other words, somehow the caption info is being stripped even from .CR3 files, not just from the .DNG files PurRaw produces.
Here is my work flow. I use Bridge and ACR and PS, not LR.
1. I cull images I don't want using Bridge and ACR.
2. I then batch caption them with species name etc as well as my contact info. This is in a separate sidecar XMP file.
3. I create subfolders according to species and move files into those accordingly.
4. I then colour label images within each folder according to their priority.
5. I then copy those I want to run through Pur RAW to a separate subfolder within a specific species folder. This subfolder is named RunPR.
So far I have run DxO PR on only a small number of the RAW files in the RunPR sub folder, but all the RAWs in that subfolder have nevertheless lost all the caption info, even the .CR3 files.
In Camera RAW Preferences/File Handling, I have it set to write XMP data to DNG files. Should that be set to always use sidecar?

Second and even more troubling is that most (but not all) the time, when I run a RAW file through DxO PR, the size of the animal subject ends up much smaller in the PR DNG than in the original file, even though I have the PR settings set not to apply any optical corrections. I have had this issue both in the lastest version of DxO PR and the previous version. I have had this issue running both Deep Prime and Deep Prime XD. 

I have selected the optics module for my camera and lens as the optics module setting in DxO Pur Raw.

I get the size of the animal subject smaller in some images but not in others. I have no idea what I am doing differently. For one file where the animal was smaller in the PR DNG, I retrieved a "virgin" copy of it from my backup hard drive and copied that to a brand new folder and from there the animal did not become smaller when I ran it through PR. 
I then tried two different RAWs NOT taken from my backup, just the ones I had run through the numbered steps above. One was fine and the other one again made the animal smaller in the frame. The former had no colour label and that latter had a colour label. I removed the colour label and ran it through PR again but it still made the animal smaller in the image.

So frustrating! Any help would be so much appreciated. 

Roberta Olenick

I just tried running an image without selecting my camera/lens in the optics module and the animal was STILL smaller in the frame aftre running through DxO Pur Raw

Don't know anything about DXO PurRaw but did remove all of the weird HTML font tags from your original post   ;)

When the subject appears smaller, are you saying that the file dimensions change after using PureRAW? I have not heard about this issue.

No. The file dimensions stay the same but the subject is reduced in size with in the same size file. I think I have cracked the case though. I had applied optical corrections within ACR before running the file through DxO. PurRaw. It seems that DxO strips that information from the DNG file it creates. So now I am not applying optical correction, either in a CR before running the file through DxO, or in DxO itself. Then the subject size remains the same and if I want to apply optical correction to the DNG, I do that in ACR after noise reduction. It seems the optical corrections. DxO applies are a bit different than those from ACR.

I also solve the metadata issue. I have set preferences to always use a Sidecar file rather than have it write metadata directly to a DNG.

Interesting, and it sounds like a good idea to run the plain RAW file through DxO PureRAW. DxO might be interested in your observations, could be some bug they are not aware of.

Are the pixel dimensions the same but the subject is smaller or does DXO just add more pixels around the outside to give you the impression that the subject is smaller but it is really the same with more border pixels - if it is the latter, it could simply be how DXO handles lens correction but that difference should be fairly small?

E.J. Peiker wrote: Are the pixel dimensions the same but the subject is smaller or does DXO just add more pixels around the outside to give you the impression that the subject is smaller but it is really the same with more border pixels - if it is the latter, it could simply be how DXO handles lens correction but that difference should be fairly small?

No pixel dimensions are the same.
If I remove optical corrections from RAW file in ACR and run that through DxO without using DxO optical corrections, the images match perfectly except for noise reduction (and maybe a bit of exposure difference which is not a big issue to adjust).

If I remove optical corrections in ACR and run that through DxO using DxO optical corrections and compare the resulting DxO image with the original RAW with ACR optical corrections applied, those two files do not match completely (though are similar). So DxO handles optical corrections for same camera/lens a bit differently than ACR

Yeah, that's kind of what I thought. The correction algorithms are causing this behavior. From what I know of your work, Roberta, optical corrections are probably not too important. They are really important if you have vertical or horizontal lines like buildings, walls, or an ocean horizon...

E.J. Peiker wrote: Yeah, that's kind of what I thought.  The correction algorithms are causing this behavior.  From what I know of your work, Roberta, optical corrections are probably not too important.  They are really important if you have vertical or horizontal lines like buildings, walls, or an ocean horizon...

Well by optical corrections, that also includes, of course, vignetting and chromatic aberration, which can be important. But I can apply those afterwards when I run the DxO process file through ACR for all the various other adjustments.

Chromatic aberration isn't much of a thing on most high quality telephoto lenses, much more problematic with wide angle lenses.