When using DxO I often find I really like the printed results at native resolution. I also find that I am less satisfied at the pixel peeping level.

Which leads to my problem in uprezzing. DxO allows you to uprez the image as part of their processing but it only seems to be enlarging the problem I see at the pixel level. Yet if you process the raw file with another program, some of the functionality of DxO can be disabled. I shoot Nikon and even when I pre-process in Capture, I get the warning that some of DxO functionality may be disabled as a result. If I were to up-rez first in photoshop using a tif file, then my guess is the cool stuff about DxO would go away such as distortion correction and lens blur removal.

Any thoughts?

Yep, this has been my complaint with DXO as well. In addition to straight uprezzing, I see the weak processing in stitched images that I've preprocessed in DXO. It comes across as a diagonal hatch pattern in the image.

I've only played with a couple test images so far, but Mark Welsh has described a workaround to being stuck with DXOs demosaicing algorithms here: 16:9.net DXO Review

In short, DXO relies on Nikon's Exif makers notes to determine lens, focus distance, etc to tune its distortion correction. I *think* this info is preserved when you demosaic with Nikon software. It's not preserved with ACR/LR, Raw Developer or C1 (to name the ones I've tried).

Marks method as I've tried it, is to use Exiftool to copy all the important information from a virgin NEF to a demosaiced TIFF. This seems to work perfectly. I've also tried NEF -> ACR -> Upres -> Exiftool Copy -> DXO, but that doesn't work - DXO disables the distortion correction in this case.

In my brief test, uprezzing in PS after all this looks better than straight DXO processing/uprezzing.

So, a little kludgy, but that's a workaround to use whatever demosaic software you want, and still use DXO for distortion correction.

Thanks for the tip! I will give it a try as soon as possible and post how I fared.

Regards,
Bryan