If you’ve been paying for a Lightroom Classic subscription while quietly wondering whether it’s still worth it, DxO PhotoLab 9 is a direct answer to that question. After roughly 15 years of Lightroom as his primary editing tool, Matt Day spent two months with PhotoLab 9 before canceling his Adobe subscription entirely.
Coming to you from Matt Day, this detailed hands-on video walks through how DxO PhotoLab 9 actually works as a day-to-day editing environment, not as a feature checklist, but as a real workflow replacement. One of the first differences Day points out is that PhotoLab 9 doesn’t use a catalog system. You work directly off your files wherever they’re stored, on any internal or external drive, without importing anything. It’s non-destructive, and your adjustments export to a new file rather than touching the originals. Day was skeptical of this at first, having relied on Lightroom catalogs for organization, but PhotoLab 9’s project system solved that for him. Photos spread across multiple drives can be grouped and accessed together without moving a single raw file.
The editing side, what PhotoLab 9 calls the Customize panel, maps closely enough to Lightroom’s Develop module that Day says the retraining period was shorter than expected. A few weeks of regular use and the new layout started to feel natural. DxO Smart Lighting is one of the tools he highlights early, a balanced exposure tool that reads the image and gets you to a reasonable starting point without much manual input. The film rendering options are another standout: the software includes emulations of Kodak Portra 160NC, Fuji 400H, Lomography Color Negative 800, Ilford HP5 Plus 400, and others. Day doesn’t use these as accuracy benchmarks, he uses them the way he’d use a color profile in Lightroom, dialed back to around 40 to 50 percent intensity and then tweaked manually from there. The noise reduction is also worth calling out. Working with Nikon Z8 files, Day turns on the denoising tool and the result is nearly instant, with color noise cleaned up and a texture that reads more like film grain than digital smearing.
One feature that nearly convinced Day on its own is the scanned film optimization tool, which handles negative inversion directly inside the app. He’s been using Negative Lab Pro for film scanning for around seven years, but that plugin requires a Lightroom subscription to run. PhotoLab 9 builds the inversion workflow in natively. For black and white film, Day says the results are comparable to Negative Lab Pro and actually faster to get to. Color negative inversion is a different story, and he’s honest about where PhotoLab 9 still has some catching up to do. That comparison, and the full walkthrough of how Day processes both digital and film images, is worth seeing in full. It’s also worth noting that the scanned film optimization tool requires DxO FilmPack as an add-on.
Beyond the editing tools, Day flags two things that matter to him independently of image quality: PhotoLab 9 is a one-time purchase at $239 for a new license, and nothing in your workflow touches a cloud server. Your files stay local. When Day went to cancel his Adobe subscription, he was offered free months and a discount before being hit with a roughly $90 cancellation fee. He paid it and moved on. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Day.