It’s just my workflow, so I’m just used to it as a first step.
I like it most because of the lens profiles for me, because a lot of my older lenses are not in lensfun or adobe.
It makes tools which don’t have a full processing pipeline more usable , because a lot of the prep work is already done (for example, I don’t have to rely on Affinity Photo to offer support for a lens or camera body if dxo supports it).
It makes Filmulator much more usable for me for example.
On my older a mount glass with a lot of purple fringing , dxo has done a better job or the defringing then what I was able to manage with ACR or rawtherapee (my tools at that time ).
And it helps my old poor Ultrabook a lot if darktable gets an image that is already demosaiced and corrected. Means it only has to do the color and tone mapping. It noticeable quicker in making changes.
I know I use it a lot , but it’s just my weapon of choice as a preprocessor. I like toying with playraws just as a way to get more experience with different scenes and pictures I wouldn’t take myself that often. So even if I end up getting a look that is almost the same as something that is posted before , I still like trying it to see what happens .
I didn’t try this picture as a pure raw in DT. I still might . I think it would allow to get a bit more range in the sky, because of the highlight reconstruction options in DT (with ACR or DxO you have to accept what they have done with partially clipped highlights ), and I think the demosaicing can be better for finer details with amaze or RCD.
And sometimes dxo can be a life saver with it’s denoising … Sometimes you think it’s the greatest thing ever and then you notice that it’s not doing anything other tools can do as well :). (The old high iso playraw or bread is a good example. Pixel peeping I think ‘only dxo can do this’, but when viewing the whole picture you realize it doesn’t really matter ).
I was just ‘shocked’ when I looked at the pure uncorrected image. I have never seen a lens with such strong vignetting and distortion and fringing (except with aspc lenses on a ff body or something ), but I also didn’t realize yet that it was a compact camera at that time :).
