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?

[Sports_N_stuff]

Sounds like you're making some progress.  I did a little testing here.  I've got some large group edits I'm planning to execute in Python to adjust for lighting and saturation on certain colors in a particular venue.  I thought I'd do some test runs on the automation of cropping.  Here are some things I found that might add to investigation of cropping:

1) I took a .cr2 image I had cropped long ago and built a Python routine to pull it's values by externally harnessing the Exiftool functions.

 2) developed a data structure to store new treatments for the image and had Python harness the exiftool functions to inject the cropping values for a smaller square crop in the upper left corner of the image. 

3) Ran the algorithm against the CR2 file and it did indeed change the crop as directed and the change was readily visible in DPP4.

4) Selecting the altered .CR file in DPP4 I exported it's recipe to a .DR4 recipe file.

5) Taking an unchanged copy of the original file I was working with, a copy I had set aside ahead of time, I imported the recipe from the .DR4 file, and it did, in fact apply the newly altered cropping to this image as well. 

So that might be good news.  In the long run cropping changes in older files can still be made to transition smoothly across formats and versions of DPP.   This was an image shot with my %D Mk IV.   I need to update my version of Exiftools, and I'm doing this through functions as implemented in version 13.33.

I tried unsuccessfully to edit the crop using topmargin and leftmargin but I didn't try real hard.  That may be possible.  Re. your recent efforts:  I'm not seeing a field for "Constrianed" width or height in the metadata from my old cameras. 

If you want to try something else you might want to try moving a copy of some sample picture to your exiftool folder and running the exiftool script below against it:

exiftool -CanonVRD:CropX=1160 -CanonVRD:CropY=150 -CanonVRD:CropWidth=3000 -CanonVRD:CropHeight=3000 MYFILExxx.CR2

This should create a small, square crop in the upper left corner that is 3000 x 3000 pixels.  If you're not seeing CanonVRD:CropY and CanonVRD:CropX in your metadata then maybe this edit would not have anywhere to land, but, particularly if you have those fields available, you should see cropping successfully edited from running this. 

Good luck!

[andre-7d]

I would caution against getting too deep into the weeds in this discussion. The only hope for this thread for me was that Canon would consider changing DPP4 to convert their own DPP3 recipes when reading image files edited in DPP3. This is just basic product management. That hope has failed - Canon clearly is not interested in maintaining their DPP apps in this way.

Just to reply to what you described, I'm not making progress because trying to figure out mappings between proprietary EXIF fields Canon created is a losing battle, so I gave it a try years ago and I decided not to pursue it - it's a big lift to develop and maintain a product like this because Canon will keep changing these specs, so it would be a never-ending race.

With regards to exiftool cropping fields, I found the reason cropping fields are not displayed correctly and created an issue for exiftool. I will briefly describe what's going on, but I don't think we should continue diving into all these details in this forum.

So, the issue with CropWidth and CropHeight is that exiftool confuses VRD and DR4 values somehow. You you print folder structure, like this:

exiftool -CanonVRD:* -v2 -H file.cr2

 , you will see the correct CropWidth and CropHeight values next to CropLeft and CropTop for DPP3 crop data. DPP4 appears to be using CropX, CropY and the same CropWidth and CropHeight, which seems to confuse exiftool into combining the two, so DPP3 cropping data is mangled to print zeros for many of those fields.

[andre-7d]

A quick update on my earlier point with crop values. I figured how to extract only DPP3 or DPP4 values. The top one is DPP3 and the bottom is DPP4.

exiftool -1CanonVRD:* -s -H -a @_MG_2280.CR2
exiftool -1CanonDR4:* -s -H -a @_MG_2280.CR2

The issue I ran into earlier was caused by DPP4 tags with the same names overwriting DPP3 tags.

You can also get both recipes in one go by using `-CanonVRD -G0:1 -a`, which was suggested by Phil Harvey.

[Stephen]

IDK if this will help or not, but I put this together - it’s 100% unofficial and unsupported by Canon https://condra.me/dpp3-dpp4-bridge 

[andre-7d]

Thank, you Stephen. You are braver than I am 🙂 This will be a challenge to maintain, I'm afraid. Expensive too - Claude Opus 4.8 is not cheap. I will keep an eye on this repository for sure.