topic Re: DPP in Camera Software

DPP

DC65 — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 02:51:25 GMT

I have a T4i and I have been looking at photo editing software. I'm interested in the DPP software, mainely because it's free.

The latest version 4, from what I can see only works with full frame cameras. I'm not quite sure if version 3.13.0 is still available.

I'm new to photogrophy and there is a lot I don't understand but I'm sticking with it.

Can anyone tell me if I should be persuing DPP or start saving up for Lightroom and a new computer?

Thank you.

Re: DPP

Peter — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 10:17:44 GMT

It works with version 4. Start with that.

Re: DPP

Waddizzle — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 12:00:42 GMT

@Peter wrote:
It works with version 4. Start with that.

I would also suggest the freeware application " Paint Dot Net " for photo editing, instead of Photoshop.

Re: DPP losing sharpness WITHIN DPP 4

imitchell119 — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 17:59:06 GMT

Hi,

I am noticing that I have higher quality images displayed in the "Crop and Rotate Images" but when I click on another tab (such as "Adjust Image Detail") the images looses a some sharpness, contrast, saturation. This is true of the other tabs as well.

Only the "Crop and Rotate Images" tab has the noticeably higher quality.

Any thoughts on how to fix this (or what is causing this)?

DPP 4.9.20.0

Canon 40D RAW images

Thanks!

Re: DPP losing sharpness WITHIN DPP 4

BurnUnit — Sun, 03 Mar 2019 05:47:38 GMT

I'm probably oversimplifying things here, but I think I've seen similar behavior when using DPP4. And I believe DPP4 is working properly, or at least as well as it can under certain conditions or on a given computer.

The adjustments you make under most, if not all, of the adjustment tabs are not applied to your full size RAW image on the fly as you make them. They are only made to the smaller image you see onscreen as you make your edits. This is done to help speed up your workflow as certain adjustments would take a lot longer if they were applied to the full size RAW file. Some of this may also depend on the capabilities of your computer, such as RAM, processor speed and graphics card.

DPP4 may consider the cropping and rotating to be the final step of your editing and attempt to apply all or at least most of your other adjustments at this point. But still, none of these edits has been actually applied to your RAW file. That only happens when you "Convert and Save" the image as a JPEG or TIFF. That's why converting to JPEG or TIFF takes so much longer, especially if you've done much noise reduction or sharpening. And even then, no real permanent changes are made to the RAW file.

I suspect if you Convert and Save a given image both with and without a crop and rotate adjustment you'll get two identical pictures, less any applied cropping and rotating. And now we'll sit back and see if any of the more experienced members here can explain this any better than I can.

Re: DPP

Maxie28 — Sat, 30 Mar 2019 05:34:03 GMT

M5, 7D, 6D, D30, 300D, 30D, 1000D IR, EOS DCS 3c, EOS D2000, 16-35/4L IS, 100/2,8 Macro, 70-200/2,8L IS II, 24-105/4L, 85/1,8, 50/1,4, 24/1,4L II, 300/2,8L IS, Helios 58/2 diebestetest

Darktable, RawTherapee, Photomatix, Luminance HDR, GIMP 2.10.6.

Just what I needed, worked a treat, thank you!

Re: DPP losing sharpness WITHIN DPP 4

wq9nsc — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 15:33:15 GMT

BurnUnit covered it very well. There is a lot of processing going on when manipulating these large digital image files and depending upon computer resources available DPP will respond very differently. I haven't noticed the behavior the original poster noted about sharpness/contrast only appearing to have changed in one of the available editing tabs but I am using a dual CPU workstation with a fast graphics card.

With just the update from a slower to a faster graphics card in the last month, I noticed a change in how the auto gamma adjust tool responds. With my prior Nvidia card during auto gamma adjust I would see several changes in the appearance of the image as it worked through the adjustment. With the new graphics card which has more and faster "Cuda" cores available to DPP I see one shift in appearance as it starts adjustment and then a final shift as it finishes instead of all of the interim adjustments AND the auto gamma process is extremely fast now.

DPP will still provide the same quality output files with slower systems but it won't be as responsive in showing you what is happening during processing and the processing will take longer.

Rodger

Re: DPP losing sharpness WITHIN DPP 4

imitchell119 — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 00:24:41 GMT

Thanks folks -

Was away, was not ignoring your help!

I just find it so odd that the software/computer clearly has the ability to display the detail (after my adjustments) in the crop/rotate tab, but nowhere else. When my JPGs are exported soft (and they all do) I can't tell if it's because they are JPGs or because the image is soft in DPP.

It drives me nuts to see the detail disappear when a change tabs.

I should mention that this happens when there is no croping going on the crop/rotate tab - so all the tabs are showing the same original size image, but just one is sharp.

What a pain

Re: DPP losing sharpness WITHIN DPP 4

BurnUnit — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 01:14:34 GMT

After doing a "Convert & Save" to your RAW files, do the resulting JPEG or TIFF files look as sharp and clear as the image you're seeing in the Crop & Rotate tab before you do the conversion? If so, I imagine that DPP4 is working properly and as well as possible on your computer under the circumstances. But I can understand it giving you doubts as to whether the software or your eyes are playing tricks on you.

I run DPP4 on a Win7 machine that's a few years old and is not nearly as "juiced up" as the computer Rodger is working on. Less RAM, a very basic graphics card and probably a slower processor. DPP4 works and overall I'm happy with the results, but it's often a frustrating and slow process.

But I also installed DxO OpticsPro a couple years ago on the same machine and it seems to run smoother and faster in many processes and I have to admit that I'm just as happy with the results I get. You might try a free 30 day download of DxO Photolab (the upgraded version OpticsPro) and see if it works better on your computer. But be warned that there will probably be a bit of a learning curve involved if you've gotten used to the DPP4 interface.

Re: DPP losing sharpness WITHIN DPP 4

imitchell119 — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 16:31:32 GMT

Exported JPGs are soft (even though high quality is specified) and look like the "soft tabs" in DPP.

I don't think computer power affects anything but how long the image processing takes. Unless the software can detect poor graphics capability and then actually change the image processing algorithm(s) it uses - but one would think that it would give me a choice.

Re: DPP losing sharpness WITHIN DPP 4

wq9nsc — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 19:17:27 GMT

That is very odd that you notice a significant drop in sharpness when converting to JPG. A JPG conversion with quality set to 10 should look very nice and very close in quality (including sharpness) to the displayed RAW image in DPP. For printing, I export TIF files which are 10 to 15 times the size of a high quality JPG file but on the monitor a high quality JPG and TIF file look extremely close and as good as the displayed processed RAW file in DPP.

Are you viewing the converted JPG files in DPP or the computer's native JPG viewer? Is it possible that the JPG viewer you are using is doing its own compression/quality loss?

Rodger

Re: DPP losing sharpness WITHIN DPP 4

BurnUnit — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 19:55:37 GMT

At this point I'd try a little experiment. Set up your camera on a tripod outdoors under good sunlight conditions. Shoot a static scene with enough detail and contrast to judge for clarity and sharpness at the highest JPEG resolution and quality level. Then shoot the exact same scene as a RAW file using the same exposure settings. Keep the shutter speed up and stop the aperture down a bit to get things focused as sharply as possible.

Open both files in DPP4 and compare them with no editing applied.Then convert and save a copy of the RAW file as both a JPEG and a TIFF file and compare them again to the image shot as a JPEG. Then do a little bit of a crop & rotate adjustment to the RAW file and convert and save it as another JPEG file and compare it to the other images. If you're seeing much of a change of quality in any of these images post a few samples here so we can see what's going on.

Re: DPP losing sharpness WITHIN DPP 4

Waddizzle — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 09:19:52 GMT

@imitchell119 wrote:
Hi,

I am noticing that I have higher quality images displayed in the "Crop and Rotate Images" but when I click on another tab (such as "Adjust Image Detail") the images looses a some sharpness, contrast, saturation. This is true of the other tabs as well.
Only the "Crop and Rotate Images" tab has the noticeably higher quality.

Any thoughts on how to fix this (or what is causing this)?

DPP 4.9.20.0
Canon 40D RAW images

Thanks!

Any image can look “soft” when zoomed in far enough.

The 40D RAW files are only 10MB, or so. DPP should be to handle those files with ease. It would make sense that “Crop and Rotate” would display a high resolution image, so that you can make precise adjustments.

Significant amounts of adjustments can soften images, too. Noise reduction and Sharpness can both remove details.

Re: DPP

imitchell119 — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 10:39:53 GMT

I guess I would agree but the crop/rotate is showing the fine detail after adjustments.

I'll follow the procedures from BurnUnit as well as get my hands on a more powerful computer (but I don't think compute power would degrade anything but the speed of processing)

Re: DPP

Waddizzle — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 10:59:23 GMT

Making several DIFFERENT, heavy adjustments can make images look soft, is what I meant. Sorry.

Re: DPP

BurnUnit — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 12:41:25 GMT

@imitchell119 wrote:
I guess I would agree but the crop/rotate is showing the fine detail after adjustments.

I'll follow the procedures from BurnUnit as well as get my hands on a more powerful computer (but I don't think compute power would degrade anything but the speed of processing)

I think you're 100% correct in making this assumption. But it would be interesting to know if you do see any difference in the final output between your current computer and one with a bit more "oooomph". I would expect only the processing speed to improve.

Re: DPP losing sharpness WITHIN DPP 4

BurnUnit — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 12:44:20 GMT

@Waddizzle wrote:
Any image can look “soft” when zoomed in far enough.

The 40D RAW files are only 10MB, or so. DPP should be to handle those files with ease. It would make sense that “Crop and Rotate” would display a high resolution image, so that you can make precise adjustments.

Significant amounts of adjustments can soften images, too. Noise reduction and Sharpness can both remove details.

Thanks for adding that. It's too easy to take just a narrow view when trying to sort out a problem like this, especially when trying to diagnose things so remotely. All comparisons should be made with the images viewed at 100% magnification to be valid.

Re: DPP

imitchell119 — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 17:59:40 GMT

No need for apologies Waddizzle - all thoughts/input are greatly appreciated!!!

I'm happy folks are talking me through this

Re: DPP

wq9nsc — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 23:58:23 GMT

The computer resources available shouldn't create any difference in the ultimate quality of the output file, the only difference will be the time required to create it. From a process viewpoint it is easier to work with a faster computer because you spend less time waiting for the computer to do its processing after you make an image adjustment. I first started using DPP with a Canon 1D Mark II back in 2005 with a pretty slow Dell desktop and with that setup I found plenty of other things to do while the computer was crunching through a RAW image 🙂

It is also a great point that cropping with the associated "zooming" will result in a softer looking image as the sensor to screen pixel assignment hits a 1 to 1 ratio or beyond and this happens long before this point when higher ISO (or poor exposure) results in softening via noise. Under the right conditions, pretty severe crops can be used that will still provide a reasonably sharp photo at normal viewing or print sizes but trying to "blow them up" beyond that point results in softness.

As an example, the first crop below uses about 25% of the sensor area of my 1DX M2 and the second crop is 4% of the available sensor area so trying to do a large magnification or print of the tiny crop would result in a very soft photo and neither crop would be desirable for portrait work.

Rodger

Re: DPP losing sharpness WITHIN DPP 4

RobertTheFat — Sat, 27 Apr 2019 16:04:59 GMT

@imitchell119 wrote:
Exported JPGs are soft (even though high quality is specified) and look like the "soft tabs" in DPP.

I don't think computer power affects anything but how long the image processing takes. Unless the software can detect poor graphics capability and then actually change the image processing algorithm(s) it uses - but one would think that it would give me a choice.

To me your symptoms suggest that DPP may be running out of memory and therefore unable to do the more detailed computations. If you're on a windows machine, you might try devoting more disk space to paged memory. That could slow things down a little (or a lot), but it might conceivably solve the immediate problem.