DxO ViewPoint

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DxO ViewPoint tackles among the more intractable problems in photography—the perspective and geometric distortions that result from using certain lenses (especially wide-angle ones) and capturing subjects at indirect angles. The latest version adds tools for manually correcting specific areas of an image, and we like how ViewPoint works both by itself and as a plug-in for other photo editing software. It’s the only app we've tested that solely handles these types of fixes, and DxO claims the technology is unique. As such, ViewPoint is worth its high price if you frequently take photos that unavoidably distort people or architecture. If you want a broader set of photo editing tools, however, Adobe Lightroom Classic is our overall Editors' Choice winner.

How Much Does ViewPoint Cost?

ViewPoint is available for a one-time purchase of $109. If you are upgrading from an earlier version, you pay $69. There's no subscription option, so the software is yours forever once you purchase it. You can test ViewPoint with an unlimited 30-day trial for the price of an email address.

For reference, both DxO PhotoLab, which can pull photo information from a raw camera file and automatically tune an image, and PureRAW, which does an amazing job at noise correction, are also available as one-time purchases.

What Does ViewPoint Fix and What's New?

The major issue that ViewPoint solves is volume anamorphosis, though the company has moved to the slightly less head-scratching term volume deformation. It describes what happens to, for example, a head that looks stretched at the side of a wide-angle shot. This effect causes the form of the originally 3D subject to change, and not usually in a pleasing way. ViewPoint corrects for this. It also fixes more straightforward perspective problems. Consider situations in which you're pointing the camera up at a building and want the shot to look straight on.

Now in its fifth version, the software continues to gain capabilities. Surprisingly, none of the latest ones employ generative AI. They're mostly about applying geometry edits in local areas of a photo. The big new feature is Reshape Fusion, which lets you move, rotate, and scale specific areas of a photo. A new Propagation slider lets you control how these edits affect the surrounding parts of the photo. The software lets you apply local volume deformation and perspective corrections, too.

Can Your Computer Run ViewPoint?

Here are the requirements for installing ViewPoint on Windows:

• Any CPU that supports SSE 4.1

• 8GB of RAM

• 4GB of available disk space

• Microsoft Windows 10 version 20H2 or higher (64-bit, and still supported by Microsoft)

And here are the requirements for macOS computers:

• Any CPU (either Intel or Apple silicon)

• 8GB of RAM

• 4GB of available disk space

• macOS 11.6 (Big Sur) or higher

I tried the standalone version of DxO ViewPoint on a Windows 11 PC with a 3.60GHz Intel Core i7-12700K, 16GB RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, and a 512GB Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.

At over half a gigabyte, ViewPoint isn't the smallest program to download, but that's not unusual. When you install ViewPoint with custom settings, you can choose to install plug-ins for Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Lightroom Classic, as well as for DxO PhotoLab. Another option is to install it both as a plug-in and a standalone application.

A Straightforward Interface

ViewPoint's standalone application window opts for the pleasing dark gray color scheme from other modern photo applications. A left panel shows your storage folder devices in a tree view, and a button switches this to a view of just recent photos you’ve worked on. You can drag and drop a photo or open it the old-fashioned way with a File dialog to start editing.

Note that ViewPoint doesn’t do camera raw file conversion: It works only with JPG or TIFF file formats. It doesn't support HEIC/HEIF files either, a JPG replacement that many smartphones use to reduce file sizes.

Even though it doesn't work with raw camera files, you still need to download profile data from DxO's database to use the program's lens corrections. You must also use original out-of-camera images rather than an edited one; ViewPoint requires the camera metadata to make its corrections. You can still use the software's perspective and geometry correction tools, just not the Auto Distortion correction, which takes into account camera and lens properties.

A panel to the right of the large central work area offers the program's correction tools: Crop, Distortion (for lens-profile-based optic corrections), Horizon, Miniature effects. Perspective, Reshape Fusion, and Volume Deformation. The options differ a little depending on whether you’re using the standalone ViewPoint, the plug-in version, or the PhotoLab panel.

Helpful diagrammatic buttons portray what each tool does. A full-screen button at top right removes distracting OS borders. A hand zoom slider and optional grid overlay, as well as side-by-side before/after views complete the set of useful interface tools.

Correcting Volume Distortion and Perspective

I compared ViewPoint's tools with Lightroom's geometry tools; I've had some success with Lightroom's Upright feature in the past. Upright works acceptably for inanimate objects, but human features are a different story. Correcting with Lightroom's Auto option changes the edges of the shot, while ViewPoint manages to maintain the photo's aspect ratio. With ViewPoint's Volume deformation tool, you choose one of two buttons—one for photos stretched side-to-side and another for those stretched in all the corners diagonally. I managed to get faces to look a lot more natural and keep subjects in the frame with this tool.

Below, I applied ViewPoint’s Volume Deformation correction tool to one such shot:

And here’s how Lightroom’s Geometry Auto tool handles the same shot:

Lightroom does almost as good a job correcting the distortion on the edges, though it cuts off the corner of the image. In some cases, Lightroom makes the problem worse, for example, further stretching an already distorted head. (These are tightly cropped in versions of larger images, so they're not especially sharp.) Lightroom's Vertical choice didn’t change the proportions, and its Full choice distorted a face considerably more than the original. DxO made faces look better in the group shot, though it ended up curving the ceiling lines. This example shows the dilemma of geometry corrections. When you fix one area, you often mess up another.

For simple perspective correction, however, the Auto option in Lightroom’s Upright tool works just as well as ViewPoint’s Perspective. First, here’s the correction using Lightroom’s tool:

And here’s DxO ViewPoint’s correction of the same shot:

Once you have the perspective looking right, hit the Apply button. Doing this also crops the photo, since the edges are no longer rectangular after the corrections.

How Does Reshape Fusion Work?

The big new tool in ViewPoint is Reshape Fusion, which replaces the previous version's plain-old Reshape tool. It still places a grid over your image and lets you stretch and compress the pixel areas however you like. Reshape Fusion doesn't have an automatic option like most of the tools in the program, but it helps in some situations. Remember how the correction above made faces look better but curved the ceiling line? The Reshape Fusion tool lets you go in and manually adjust specific areas of the photo, so, with some tinkering, you can fix that artifact of the previous correction. You do this by dragging corner points on a grid overlay, as shown below.

You get choices of 4-by-4, 8-by-8, and 32-by-32 grids, or you can set a custom number. Above, I chose an 8-by-8 grid and made some progress toward straightening out the ceiling line. A little more diligence can produce a convincing result. A cool capability is that you can select multiple points on the grid and move them together. Finally, you can choose another color for the grid if the default blue doesn’t work with your image.

As for the Fusion aspect, a new toolbar at the bottom of the interface offers more options and control. Three modes let you switch between Free Transform, Perspective, and Volume Deformation modes. That’s right: You can now use local editing with the tools discussed above. What’s more, you can drag the mouse over a section of grid points and move them in sync. The Propagation slider determines how far-reaching the edits are. Your selected grid area changes color, which looks pretty cool. As you slide the Propagation slider in and out, you see the color area shrink and expand. When you drag a control point around, the entire area warps together.

Only the Free Transform option lets you drag control points in the grid around. With Perspective, you use the same parallel lines to reshape the image. After you do this, the Propagation slider determines the extent to which the corrections apply. With Volume Deformation, you use sliders for Horizontal and Vertical leveling. I have one photo where the global adjustment for this didn’t work; it fixed distortion on one side of the image but introduced it on the other. The local version of this correction in Reshape Fusion solved that problem.

Changing the geometry of a photo in these ways can sometimes result in losing image content at the edges, but ViewPoint’s Sticky Borders option prevents that from happening. Something that I think would be helpful is if you could invert the selection area. This would allow you to easily protect an area from the geometry edits. Even beyond that would be a way to generate content for crops that result in non-rectangular images.

Effective Horizon and Crop Tools

The DxO app's Horizon tool works automatically to good effect, even for a mountain scene in which the horizon isn’t obvious. You can also use guidelines to show the program lines in your image that should be parallel or horizontal. The guidelines are very easy to control, and you can place two anchor points anywhere along the line.

The Crop tool is useful for tidying up the sides after you apply one of the manipulations above. Its Auto mode works with the previous corrections, but you can also open a standard crop tool with edges you move to taste and a mask that shows the crop area.

Verdict: A Unique, Useful Photo Correction Tool

At $109, DxO ViewPoint won't interest most casual photographers. But if you make your living behind the camera or take the photographic arts very seriously, you should add it to your digital darkroom's software arsenal. ViewPoint is especially essential if you need to use a wide-angle lens to photograph groups of people without causing unflattering distortion. You simply won't find another program with this singular focus. Just keep in mind that our overall Editors' Choice winner, Adobe Lightroom Classic, has some of the same capabilities on top of a superb range of workflow and editing tools.