What is the best way to create DTOs from entities and update entities from DTOs in a layered architecture?

Option 1:

At first I would make a call to my service layer, which served as an API for my core domain, to get a domain object or a list of domain objects and then pass them into the assembler which would construct the DTOs I needed for my view. The problem I have with this approach are cases where the domain object is large and I don't want to load in the whole object just to copy a few fields needed for the DTO (ie showing a list of summaries entities).

Option 2:

The next approach I used was to wire in a repository (for read-only purposes) into my assembler so that I could only query the database for the fields I need in the DTO. I can also use this repository when I get a DTO and need to use it to update and entity. For example, a DTO filled will values I need to update on my entity comes into my assembler, the assembler looks up the entity from a repository and then overlays the information from the DTO on the entity and then returns the entity. The controller then calls the service layer to save the entity that the assembler returned.

Option 3:

I could wire in the repositories directly into the controllers but something about exposing the repository in the controller seems wrong to me because the service layer should be handling transactions and security, but then again, if I put a repository in the assembler I am basically doing the same thing.

Any thoughts are welcome. I just want to understand pros and cons and what has worked well for others.