5D4 and DPP

[RobertTheFat]

In B&H's online presentation yesterday on the 5D Mark IV, the Canon representatives were at great pains to point out that some of the camera's esoteric new features depend on post-processing via Digital Photo Professional. Asked whether those features will be supported in Lightroom, one of them declined to predict whether or when Adobe, or any other third-party software vendor, would step up to the challenge.

I think that leaves Canon in a bit of a bind. Version 4 of DPP is, on paper, a very capable photo editor with a wealth of useful features. (Version 3 lags far behind and is no longer a serious player.) But its implementation is atrocious. It's buggy and painfully slow, and its GUI contains actions that are ambiguously defined (think "Save") or are unnecessarily (and confusingly) different from their implementations in previous editions of DPP. DPP's advocates (I'm one of them) have dutifully looked the other way for more than two years, hoping, against mounting evidence, that Canon would get its act together and straighten the product out. Clearly this hasn't happened, and the most recent release of DPP 4 was more than five months ago. Lightroom's users are openly contemptuous of DPP; and if they have to start using it in order to take full advantage of the 5D4, their reaction is going to be interesting (and probably entertaining), to say the least.

I guess the best that we can hope for is that the release of DPP 4 that introduces support of the new features will also clear up some or all of the existing problems. I wish I could say I thought that such an outcome were likely.

[TTMartin]

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@kvbarkley wrote:

Having the information is not enough. You need a bunch of areas set at various focus distances, which is what the Lytro does. In this case the lens still has one focus point. You might be able to tell just how far out of focus any point is, but it won't let you magically bring it into focus. You can try to de-convolve it, but I don't think it will work, without knowing a *lot* about the lens bokeh.

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Which is why you would need to use a small enough aperture to get a large enough depth of field. 

Please carefully reread what I've written. I never said anything about bringing out of focus areas into focus. Instead, I was talking about using large depth of field photos where everything was in focus, and using the distance information to create an artificial plane of focus, by applying an increasing amount of 'artificial gaussian blur' to create simulated out of focus areas.

[TTMartin]

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@TTMartin wrote:

Please carefully reread what I've written. I never said anything about bringing out of focus areas into focus. Instead, I was talking about using large depth of field photos where everything was in focus, and using the distance information to create an artificial plane of focus, by applying an increasing amount of 'artificial gaussian blur' to create simulated out of focus areas.

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An example of how this could be used, is you take a portrait photo anywhere from f/4 through f/16. You could then use the distance information to simulate the photo having been taken with an f/1.2 lens. The fine plane of focus could be moved forward or backwards within the original depth of field so it was exactly on the subjects eyes. 

edit: Almost all lenses are sharper when they are stopped down a little. This would allow you to stop the lens down for sharpness, but, still get a razor thin depth of field.