DxO PhotoLab version 10 is out today and I've had a chance to take an early look at the new features. As always with software there are a few neat little tweaks hidden away in this update, so I'm going to go through some of my favourites.

I've been using PhotoLab for a few years now and I love the editing process for my photos in it - I just feel like I have more control over colour than in competing software. Combined with the FilmPack film simulations and colour profiles, I've never been happier with how my digital photos are coming out. It helps that it continues to have what I believe is the best noise reduction options on the market, as well as continuing to be an independent company that sells software as licenses rather than monthly subscriptions. An increasingly rare thing in 2026.

New Features

Improved masking and local adjustment tools

The majority of this update covers a bunch of new and improved masking tools for local adjustments, which are always welcome. The upgrades include:

Depth Masks

Rather nifty, considering they have no depth data to work with; depth masks use machine learning models to analyse the image and figure out which parts are foreground, background, etc, and then allows you to refine your selection using sliders to target only certain distances. If you've used the portrait mode on an iPhone, you'll know roughly how this is to use, but in this instance it works with entirely flat, single photos. It's a very impressive update and extremely useful for many photographic subjects.

People Detection

There's a new capability around detecting people, where PhotoLab can identify and mask every person in a scene individually, or combine them into a single mask. It pops up a little window with the face of each person so you can choose which to include in the mask, which is handy. As someone who shoots a lot of events, weddings, and parties, this is going to be a great time-saver for me.

Face Segmentation

Another addition to the human detection masks is the ability to mask specific sections of the human face, namely; eyebrows, eyes, and lips. I don't do a huge amount of editing of this style, but I'll likely get some use out of the eye selection option in particular. It'd be interesting to have this as an option for animals in the future as well.

Control Brush

PhotoLab's Control Point masking has always been very powerful. If you're not familiar with it, it samples three parts of the image underneath the control point; hue/chroma, brightness, and contrast; and uses those to generate a soft but targeted mask. The circle denotes the outer bound of the effect of the mask, but the centre point controls the parts of the image that are affected by it. It's extremely useful for manipulating specific parts of an image, such as just the highlights coming from a coloured light, things like that.

In PhotoLab 10, there's now a Control Brush, which combines the technology behind the Control Point with the flexibility of being able to brush the mask in whatever shape you need.

New Colour Grading Toolset

This is a fun one - new colour grading tools. These allow you to quickly shift the colours across shadows/midtones/highlights and it's great for generating your own custom look. It seems to work really well in combination with the FilmPack colour presets, which I use often, and there are a few standard presets that I've found very useful. You can save your own presets for this tool specifically, which is handy.

Sensor dust removal

PhotoLab now supports detecting and automatically removing dust spots caused by dirty sensors. This has a sensitivity slider, and it's certainly a handy new feature that'll save you quite a bit of time removing the dust manually from each shot.

Finally, a white level slider (which wasn't in the release notes)

That's right, you can finally adjust the white level, not just the highlight level, in the Selective Tone area of the tools. Not sure why this wasn't there before but it's a very welcome addition for me. The whites are usually pretty important for getting a bit of sparkle in the final image, and it's something I use a lot if it's available.

Other assorted improvements

There's a bunch of other bits I'm not going to cover here, such as support for in-camera crop ratios, better file tools, histogram adjustments in the library (I didn't even know this feature existed at all before), and some improved workflow stuff for working on files in Affinity Photo.

Availability and Pricing

DxO PhotoLab 10 is out as of September 1st 2026 at 14:00 BST, and here are the price details:

New License: £229.99 / €249.99 / $249.99
Upgrade from PhotoLab 8 or 9: £114.99 / €129.99 / $129.99

You can get 15% off either a new license or upgrade by using my affiliate code: ROBERT15