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DxO PhotoLab
Rating Images

Lesson 03 of the DxO PhotoLab Zero to Hero course. Learn how to rate, sort and select your best photographs before moving into the editing stage.

Welcome to Lesson 03 of DxO PhotoLab Zero to Hero. In this lesson we are looking at rating images. Before you start editing, applying presets, adjusting exposure or using tools such as DeepPRIME, Smart Lighting and ClearView Plus, it is worth taking a moment to decide which photographs are actually worth working on.

This is one of the most important habits you can build as a photographer. Most shoots produce more images than you need. Some photographs will be technically weak, some will be duplicates, some will be almost there, and some will clearly stand out. Rating images helps you slow down, make better choices and spend your editing time on the photographs that have the most potential.

This DxO PhotoLab rating images tutorial is designed for beginners who want to understand how to use star ratings, image selection and a simple culling workflow inside PhotoLab. It sits naturally after importing images because once your photographs are visible in the software, the next step is to review them and choose the best files before editing.

Why Rating Images Comes Before Editing

One of the biggest mistakes beginners make is editing too many photographs. If you come back from a shoot with two hundred images and immediately start editing from the first frame, you can waste a huge amount of time. A better approach is to review the full set first, identify the strongest photographs, and only then move into the editing stage.

Rating images in DxO PhotoLab helps you create a simple structure. You might use one star for possible images, three stars for strong selects and five stars for your very best photographs. The exact system is up to you, but the goal is the same: reduce the clutter and make your editing process clearer.

This is especially useful for travel photography, street photography, landscape photography, portrait sessions and any shoot where you come back with more images than you can realistically edit. A good photo culling workflow helps you find the images with the best composition, expression, light, timing and overall potential.

How To Think About Star Ratings

Star ratings do not need to be complicated. For a beginner, a simple system is often best. You could start by giving one star to anything that might be useful, three stars to images you definitely want to consider, and five stars to the photographs you are confident are the strongest from the set.

The aim is not to judge every photograph perfectly on the first pass. The aim is to create a shortlist. Once you have reduced the shoot down to a more manageable number of images, you can look again with a clearer mind and make stronger editing decisions.

Inside DxO PhotoLab, rating images also helps you organise your workflow. Once images are rated, it becomes easier to filter, review and move through your selected photographs. This gives you a cleaner path into the next part of the course, where we begin discussing RAW files, presets and the first editing adjustments.

Building A Simple Culling Workflow

A simple culling workflow could look like this: first, review all the images quickly and remove or ignore anything obviously unusable. This might include missed focus, poor expressions, accidental frames, duplicates or photographs where the composition simply does not work.

Next, go through the remaining images and give a basic star rating to anything that catches your eye. Do not overthink this stage. You are simply identifying potential. After that, filter or revisit your rated images and decide which ones are strong enough to edit.

By doing this before editing, your workflow becomes much calmer. You are no longer jumping randomly between hundreds of files. You are working from a focused group of selected images, which makes the editing stage more enjoyable and more productive.

Rating Images In A Beginner Workflow

In the context of this course, rating images sits between importing images and learning RAW editing. That order is deliberate. First you find your way around DxO PhotoLab. Then you get your photographs into the software. Then you rate and select the images worth developing. Only after that do we begin talking about RAW vs JPEG, presets, exposure, white balance and the main editing tools.

This makes the course much more beginner-friendly because it follows the natural order of a real photography workflow. You do not need to understand every tool in PhotoLab before you start organising your images. You simply need to know how to choose the photographs that deserve your attention.

By the end of this lesson, you should understand why rating images matters, how star ratings can help your workflow, why selecting fewer images can improve your final results, and how this stage prepares you for the editing lessons that follow.

Continue The Course

Once you understand how to rate and select your best photographs, continue to Lesson 04, where we look at the difference between RAW and JPEG files and why RAW editing matters inside DxO PhotoLab.

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