DxO ViewPoint 6: what AI masks in ReShape Fusion change

Quick answer: DxO ViewPoint 6 is best for photographers who fix one stubborn element in a frame, such as a leaning building or a stretched face at the edge of a group shot, and want to keep their crop. It’s a specialist tool at $129.99 / €119.99 / £109.99 for a new licence (check the current price before buying). If you already run PhotoLab 10 or only need straight verticals, you may already own what you need.

What version 6 actually adds

DxO announced the release on 20 October 2026. The headline is AI masks, which build the ReShape Fusion mesh around the object you want to correct. The second change is that the stand-alone app also opens RAW files for the first time.

ReShape Fusion itself isn’t new. PetaPixel notes it builds upon the ReShape Fusion tool introduced in ViewPoint 5 two years ago. In that version, the mesh was a grid spread evenly across the image, and you moved whichever control points sat near the area you wanted to change.

Now you point at the problem. You draw a rectangle around a subject, and the software identifies the element inside and creates a mask following its outline. The mesh then is coarse where nothing needs fixing and dense where it does.

The AI in question is selection only. DxO states that “nothing is generated and nothing is invented”, and several outlets relay that ViewPoint invents no pixels, fills nothing in at the edges and leaves the frame dimensions unchanged. That matters if you shoot architecture or editorial work where generative fill is a problem.

The geometry tools underneath

The older toolset carries over. ViewPoint 6 still tackles the three faults that show up most with wide-angle lenses: barrel distortion, converging verticals and volume deformation, the last being the effect that makes people at the ends of a group look wider than those in the middle.

Distortion correction relies on DxO’s Modules, built from laboratory measurement of thousands of camera and lens combinations. Automatic and manual perspective tools remain for full-frame corrections, and horizon correction and the Miniature Effect complete the set.

Whole-frame perspective correction still costs pixels. DxO’s own user guide warns that the geometry corrections may result in significant cropping of your images. The local mesh is the way around that, but not a guarantee: Fstoppers’ barn-interior example was rescued at the price of a small crop.

A workflow for fixing one leaning building

These steps follow the process DxO and the launch coverage describe. I haven’t verified the exact panel labels in the ViewPoint 6 interface, so check them against DxO’s user guide if a button name differs.

Open the RAW file. In the stand-alone app, ViewPoint 6 can open RAW files directly, along with TIFF and JPEG. As a plug-in, it works from Lightroom Classic, Photoshop and Capture One.
Let lens corrections run. For RAW files, DxO’s own camera and lens profiles are applied automatically.
Fix the whole frame first. Use the automatic or manual perspective tool for anything that’s wrong across the entire picture, such as a tilted camera.
Switch to ReShape Fusion and choose a grid. Per Videomaker, you choose a grid, click AI and drag a rectangle around the element.
Refine the mesh. Subdivide or merge mesh regions and enable or disable individual control points.
Set how far the change reaches. Users can control how adjustments extend into neighbouring areas, which is where a bent neighbouring wall or window frame gets caught.
Export. Adjustments are written to a sidecar file, so the integrity of the original is always preserved.

Life after Photoshop adds a useful detail on step 7: the sidecar is in a different format to the sidecar files saved by DxO PhotoLab, so you won’t get conflicting adjustments.

RAW support, plug-ins and system demands

Direct RAW opening is the quieter change, and for stand-alone users it may be the more practical one. Previously, ViewPoint could not open RAW files directly but only as a plug-in for a host application that carried out the RAW processing first. It now offers exposure compensation of up to +/- 4EV and a white balance tool, which is basic but enough to prepare a file for geometry work.

Plug-in support covers Lightroom Classic, Photoshop and Capture One, and the app integrates with PhotoLab 10. A single licence can be activated on three personal computers, never run on more than one at a time, and installed on both a Mac and a PC.

The hardware bar for ReShape Fusion is higher than for the rest of the app. On Windows, DxO’s minimum is 16 GB RAM and 10 GB of disk space, and ReShape Fusion needs one of the following: an NVIDIA RTX 2000 with 6GB of VRAM, an AMD Radeon RX6000 series with 8GB of VRAM, an Intel Arc with 8GB of VRAM, or an Intel AI Boost NPU. Mac requirements are on DxO’s shop page; I didn’t verify them here.

ViewPoint 6 against the tools you may already own

Most editors can straighten verticals. What they can’t do is bend one building while leaving the next one alone. This table compares what each option does for geometry, using vendor documentation and launch coverage.

Tool	Geometry approach	Price model	Suits
DxO ViewPoint 6 (Windows, macOS)	Whole-frame perspective plus local mesh with AI masks; opens RAW, TIFF, JPEG	Perpetual licence; $129.99 new, $84.99 upgrade from ViewPoint 5	Wide-angle, architecture and group-portrait fixes without cropping
DxO PhotoLab 10	ViewPoint 6’s tools are integrated into the Geometry panel	Separate DxO product; check DxO’s shop for the edition you need	Existing PhotoLab users who want one app
Lightroom Classic	Upright offers Auto, Level, Vertical and Full modes, plus a Guided option; whole-image transform with sliders	Adobe subscription; check Adobe’s own plans page	Adobe users who need straight verticals, not local reshaping

One caveat on PhotoLab: DxO’s learning page says the Elite edition of PhotoLab comes with a limited range of geometric correction tools. Don’t assume the full ViewPoint feature set is inside every PhotoLab licence. DxO’s shop also lists a PhotoLab 10 Elite plus ViewPoint 6 bundle at $309.99 against a regular price of $379.98, though bundle pricing changes, so check it.

On the Lightroom side, Adobe recommends enabling profile corrections first: enabling lens corrections for your camera and lens combination is highly recommended before processing with the Upright modes. Julieanne Kost points out that the resulting image is often cropped when you use the Upright modes. That’s the trade-off ViewPoint’s local mesh is aimed at.

What it costs

ViewPoint 6 is a perpetual licence with no subscription. DxO’s own pages list $129.99 / €119.99 / £109.99 for a new licence and $84.99 / €74.99 / £69.99 for an upgrade from ViewPoint 5, and there’s a 30-day free trial. The chart below sets that against DxO’s other perpetual-licence product that’s relevant to a Lightroom or Photoshop workflow, Nik Collection 9, using the prices on DxO’s pages.

DxO perpetual licence prices at launch (USD)

Nik Collection 9 is a creative plug-in suite rather than a geometry tool, and can’t be bought one plug-in at a time, so it isn’t a substitute. The comparison only shows where ViewPoint sits in DxO’s price ladder.

What reviewers say

Early coverage is mostly launch reporting, and most of it repeats DxO’s framing. Two outlets add some friction.

Life after Photoshop’s review calls the price a lot of money for a very specialized tool, one that overlaps distortion and perspective tools you probably already have. Fstoppers is more favourable on the tool, yet notes that upgrades are pricey because major features arrive in paid versions rather than a subscription.

Another point comes from The Magazine for Photographers: the new geometry tools are also included in PhotoLab 10, so existing users won’t really need ViewPoint separately. That shapes who should buy, covered below.

Best for

Best for architecture and interior shooters on a perpetual-licence budget: ViewPoint 6 at $129.99, if your wide-angle work regularly forces a crop to fix converging lines. Run the 30-day trial on your worst five files first.
Best for group portrait and event photographers: ViewPoint 6, specifically for volume deformation at the frame edges and the local mesh. The AI mask saves selection time on a stretched face.
Best for existing ViewPoint 5 owners: the $84.99 upgrade, if you edit RAW in the stand-alone app and the mesh was tedious to place before.
Best for PhotoLab 10 owners: check what your edition already includes before paying for anything.
Best for Adobe subscribers with simple needs: stay in Lightroom Classic’s Transform panel and accept the occasional crop.

What this means for you

Count how many of your keepers are currently cropped, because of perspective or distortion fixes. If it’s a handful a year, the Transform panel you already pay for will do. If it’s weekly, such as real estate interiors, street scenes in tight European lanes or wide group shots, ViewPoint 6’s local mesh is aimed squarely at your problem.

Download the trial before committing, and test with the files that currently give you trouble rather than with DxO’s sample images. Check the GPU requirement against your machine first, since ReShape Fusion has a stricter list than the rest of the app.

If you own PhotoLab 10, open its Geometry panel and see which ViewPoint tools your edition includes before you spend $129.99. And treat the “no generated pixels” claim as DxO’s statement, which reviewers have relayed but which independent testers haven’t yet had long enough to stress with difficult images.