Software is cheaper than lenses

It's been quite a while since I last blogged - I just got out of the habit. There have been some significant changes, most notably I now have a Canon R7  which I should discuss separately, but also some software changes. 
In my quest to move away from Adobe, buying the R7 forced my hand, because my Adobe  Lightroom. which I was very happy with, would not display images from my R7. Other software, including Windows would display them, which just served to piss me off further with Adobe. I have been using On1 which is really very good as both a Lightroom replacement and with lots of extra functionality, good value for money. Problem is its flakey and a bit slow. So in looking around I settled upon DxO PhotoLab 6. It's essentially a Lightroom replacement, and very intuitive to use. I am very taken with it and dont have to pay out for a subscription. Perhaps most impressive is the noise removal functions. Prime is a really good basic clean up function, but PrimeXD is simply fantastic at both noise removal and detail enhancement . 
It takes quite a long time to run but is definitely worth it. 
The  R7 is lighter than my old 70D but I still didn't want to carry around the heavy 100-400mm lens. So I traded my Sony RX10 iii for a new Canon R series 100-400, which is very light and actually very good quality. My previous blog posts about how impressive the Sony was were all true but the biggest downside was the very slow focus acquisition, which meant I missed shots. The  R100-400mm  is a bit limited due to being a slower lens than the larger version, so I was bit worried about having noisy images due to needing to up the ISO to get acceptable performance. This is where the DxO photolibrary comes into its own.  It fixes this completely.  The pictures below show a cropped processed image of a little grebe taken at ISO1600 with the R7. The lower picture is additionally processed with PrimeXD and the results are awesome.  Hence I can get away with a much cheaper lens and fix the noise issues in software - and software is cheaper than lenses