Does anyone know if there is a tool available to convert DPP3 recipes to the DPP4 format?

[andre-7d]

I have TBs worth of edits in DPP3 and cannot archive them in the way that DPP4 would apply those edits. For now I'm able to use DPP3, but it will likely fail to run at some point on whatever version of Windows makes it incompatible.

Does anyone know of any tool that can convert .VRD recipe files into .DR4?

[Waddizzle]

I think I installed it as an “check for updates” inside DPP3, which might be DPP3 was removed.

[andre-7d]

> There is no tool and exiftool doesn't support it either per there user forums.

In a few of those threads they are talking about straight tag export/import, which will not work here. Somebody needs to create a mapping of all DPP3 and DPP4 recipe tags, by their IDs, not just names. That mapping can be used to migrate recipes safely. I would caution people against using any of the commands mentioned in those threads because many of them use just tag names not IDs, which is not deterministic.

I'm still looking into a few possible ways to approach this from this angle.

> Have you contacted Canon Support to inquire about this? 

My previous interactions with Canon Support weren't very fruitful. The best they can do is to forward my comments to the software development team, and that's if I'm lucky. Most likely they will just consider this working-as-designed and drop it.

So, my plan is to gather as much as I can, send them a plea that they dropped the ball on this one for many of their customers, and proceed with the assumption that they will never follow up.

[jeff_m]

A couple of years on. I have about 4TB of photos, the great majority edited using DPP3. Has this topic progressed in any constructive way? I am concerned by the possibility that some DPP3 tags may be meaningless in DPP4, in the sense that DPP4 might have adopted an approach so different that no direct remapping of tag values makes sense. But even if that were true, it would still make sense to be able to translate those tags that did have a (possibly rough) equivalent, to minimise the drudgery of redoing absolutely everything under DPP4.

I could simply choose to stratify my collection and maintain the DPP3 recipes on my Windows 10 machine. But I am not at all sure that I can rely on Windows 10 in the absence of offiicial Microsoft support, even as a single function proposition running offline. The hardware also has a finite lifetime.

Perhaps the real problem here is that Canon does not know how to maintain DPP3 any longer.

[johnrmoyer]

I hope some of this might be helpful.

It seems to me that DPP4 does things very differently from DPP3. The crop information from the dr3 file could easily be used in DPP4. Exactly duplicating color and sharpening might not be possible. The digital lens optimizer in DPP4 works for me on old CR2 files and it seems to me this is a big advantage.

I now use exiftool to add IPTC metadata and Metadata Working Group standard tags to all of the CR3 files I edit in DPP4 and also old CR2 files if I look at them again, but I only started doing this in the last few years and have not attempted to go back and add metadata to earlier files.

I no longer use Windows, but I checked today and I am still able to boot Windows 10 into a virtual machine on my Linux desktop using qemu. ( Windows spends about 2 days installing updates when it has not been booted for a long time. My windows disk is an image of a hard drive made using dd. I had a windows license from a very long time ago that was not tied to particular hardware and have use this. )

I am not certain that I remember correctly, but it seems that I may have run dpp3 on my Linux desktop using wine.

[Sports_N_stuff]

This is an old post, but for anybody else that may have been drawn to this topic .... 

As the OP probably found eventually, the forward compatibility between DPP3 and DPP4 is pretty good even though some of the logic under the covers was occasionally different.  As of this writing, my copy of DPP4 picks up CR2 images that I originally edited in DPP3 and still preserves things like cropping, brightness , highlights, saturation, color tweaks on the A/B & R/G grid, etc.  I didn't use DPP3 in those days with the same level of detail that I use DDP4 today (and I'm not sure DPP4 had things like Gamma distribution, but the work I did in the past seems to translate forward accurately.  And you can still export to a print or save as another CR2, under a new name.  DPP4 won't let you save a CR2 file as a CR3, of course, because it's missing some of the newer fields.  Perhaps, that's what the OP was referring to.  It will however, preserve and continue to work with these older files.

With respect to cropping specifically:  While it is true that the .CR2 files we were reading in DPP3 do use different field names for crop locations, I'm finding that DPP4 can differentiate between .CR2  and CR3 files and crops each accurately according to their particular underlying data formats.  I'm not finding a need, for instance, to try and translate crop dimensions from the .CR2 system into .CR3 because, again, DPP4 knows which type of file it's looking at and translates accordingly.  That's what I'm still finding with DPP4 v 4.21.10.0, anyway, and I've tried a couple of earlier versions as well.

Re.  Canon VRD fields in the newer .CR3 files:  Exiftool still seems to read these pretty well.  All the things I would want to edit do have a field that exiftool knows how to detect.  That would include things like HSL numbers for various color bandwidths and I believe it even covers lower, middle and upper reference points for an altered Gamma distribution, though I have not personally externally tweaked those particular fields.  If you have the patience to hand code it or twist and shape it through a Python routine it looks like you can also do that.   I've spot checked a few of these and the CanonVRD settings that EXIFTOOL reports for CR3 images accurately reflect the values I see in DPP4.

So bottom line .... Canon seems to have made the current tools backwards compatible with the older formats that we were reading in DPP3.