Questions about saving and converting in DPP4

[randomuser74]

I'm a newbie to DPP4 and have watched a couple of tutorials but have questions about saving.  I have RAW images from a Canon 5Ds.

1.  When I try to exit the program it asks me if I want to save and it seems to retain changes in the RAW file format. But when I click on the actual Save button, the only options are JPEG and TIFF.  Why is there that limitation on the Save button?

2. If I want these to eventually be jpegs, is the proper method to click the Save button and choose JPEG, or to do File > Convert and Save?  Or is there no difference in these mechanisms?  I see a lot of comments online about "properly exporting" so I want to do this correctly.

3. If there is something DPP4 can't quite do on a particular image and I want to continue to work on it in something like PhotoShop, is it better to choose TIFF on that particular image rather than JPEG?

4. The 5Ds has a 50 mp sensor so at full resolution JPEGs they end up being 25 MB.  This seems high, and if I'm giving several hundred of these to my friend from her wedding, that's a significant amount of storage. I can deliver her an external drive, but is that a typical final resolution size for high quality images for printing? She's not a social media user, so I don't think she needs two versions.  But she and family have said they do want some large prints.  What's the best size for high resolution JPEGs for prints in this situation?

[wq9nsc]

1.  The save on exit with DPP is saving the changed the image edit information that was applied to your RAW files.  The Save button will produce the desired JPG or TIFF output from your RAW file so it is a different "save".

2.  The convert and save is what is happening with the save button.  When you are working with a group of files, it is MUCH more efficient to batch process the RAW files to JPG or TIFF.  I use the check mark system in DPP to mark images.  For example, I shot a post-season volleyball game earlier in the week and I was providing photos to both teams but some are really team specific.  So I used checkmark 1 for photos for both teams, checkmark 2 for team A photos, and checkmark 3 for team B photos.  Then it was easy to batch process the groups into selected directories for easy distribution by using the select only specific checkmark level in DPP.  

3.  TIFF provides more data than JPG so for further work, I would go with TIFF.

4.  You can reduce file size by using a lower JPG quality level (set in the convert dialogue box) however if I need to downsize files I use the program IrfanView which is a freeware program that has been around for decades.  It is an excellent program that handles pretty much any graphic file format and one of its options is it allows you to save a file to any smaller size selected quickly and easily.  I have used it for years to downsize files and it does wonderful work of preserving quality within the limits you set.  But be sure to download it from the official website instead of one of the many sites that have it for download since the others will at the least package extra junk with it and at worst you will get malware.  I contribute to the author because I use it so much, there is a lot of free stuff out there but IrfanView is in a class by itself.  I wish he would take on the rewrite of DPP and make it less clunky 🙂

Rodger

[p4pictures]

Great question as it's not overly clear what DPP does.

1. When you exit DPP, the prompt to save the changes in the RAW file is actually exactly that. Imagine that you have an image and then in DPP you adjusted the brightness, cropped it a little and increased the saturation. Those edits are what is saved in the RAW file, actually the description of the edits is saved in the RAW file itself, it does not change the image data in the RAW, but adds these extra edit information to the metadata. Next time you open the RAW with DPP, it reads the image and the edits if any from the metadata. This way you can reset your image back to how it was taken. Saving the edit instructions only adds a small amount of data to the RAW image file. This is the same save as pressing CTRL or CMD S or choosing File > Save from the DPP menu.
   If you click on the save button at the top of the DPP window, that is actually the Convert & save function. Here DPP takes all the edits you've done and makes a new version of the file saved to either a JPG, TIFF or both at the same time. TIFF and JPG images are universally usable in many other programs and that is why they are offered as a choice. 
2. After any editing you have done, you can save the edit "recipe" to the RAW image metadata by choosing File > Save or pressing CTRL / CMD S. However if you sent the RAW to another person they would need a suitable program - DPP - to open the file and be able to see it with your edits. It's best to send them a standard file like a JPG or a TIFF. You can use Convert & Save, though if you have multiple images it is more efficient to use File > Batch processing. With batch processing you can resize the images to fit a specific size, rename files and choose the file types. For most needs a JPG image with quality  set to 8, 9 or 10 is sufficient for printing. The higher the quality, the larger the resulting JPG file size.
3. If you plan to do a "complex edit" some cloning or removing distracting elements in the photo, then Photoshop is a good option. For this it is best to have the best quality source image, in this case a 16-bit TIFF gives the best result, but the file sizes are enormous. Once you do the edits in Photoshop save the finished image as a JPG if you want to send it to someone else.
4. JPG file size is determined by the resolution, compression level and the level of detail in the image itself. The key is how big the friend will print in physical dimensions. A canvas print that is 3-feet x 2-feet would benefit from higher resolution than a letter sized print. You have a lot of resolution in your camera, so 60-inch x 40-inch prints are a possibility from the full resolution. But if the prints will only be letter sized you can happily reduce the images to around 10MP or 3900 x 2600 pixels.

Hope that clears things up for you.

[randomuser74]

Thanks for the helpful answers!

Once I learn what the largest print size is that they might get, what is the best way of reducing the size in DPP4?  Is it by using the Resize portion of Convert and Save, where I'd manually put in a different w x h in pixels?  Or is it better to select something other than 10 in the Image Quality section?

wq9nsc, is there a reason you prefer IrfanView to convert to JPEG over what DPP4 will do?

[johnrmoyer]

This is what I do and not a recommendation, but i hope some of it might be helpful anyway.

If I want to do editing in another program, I save as a 16bit TIFF from DPP and edit the TIFF with the other program.

Gimp 3 free software uses a newer version of the JPEG compression algorithm and produces smaller files with higher quality than the old version in DPP. Editing the 16 bit TIFF in Gimp and in Gimp doing "export as" JPG will produce a much smaller higher quality JPEG. In gimp I select 4:4:4 for the color quantization because it adds very little to file size and increases the color quality slightly. A "quality" number in Gimp for saving JPEG of 80 might be good enough for many purposes and will make a much smaller file. The quality parameter in the original JPEG standard was 1 to 100, but in DPP it is 1 to 10. With the older JPEG algorithm, I seldom found a quality less than 90 acceptable.

I always say no to saving when exiting DPP. For the past several years, I always save a recipe dr4 file for each CR3 or CR2 file edited so that I can re-apply the same changes. Also, exiftool can display the contents of the dr4 file.

This paper describes the new algorithm version: https://arxiv.org/html/2403.18589v1 "

Users prefer Jpegli over same-sized libjpeg-turbo or MozJPEG

"

Source code at: https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/tree/main/lib/jpegli 

New version is in Gimp 3, but not in some other software.

[ebiggs1]

The 1 to 10, or 12, when saving a jpg makes a higher quality image with less compression. You get a larger file size but retaining more image details. When using a lower quality setting it means more compression, creating a smaller file size but it is discarding more data. It can lead to artifacts and a loss of detail. However, the elephant in the room is that data is lost forever it can not be brought back or recovered. To make it even worse this happens every time you save the same jpg.
The good thing about DPP4 and the app I prefer, Photoshop, when saving a jpg with all the edits you might make the original raw file is not changed and all data is always safe and present.

Keep in mind even at the highest  setting of 12, the jpg format is a lossy file format. So, even at quality 12, some data is still lost, and re-saving a jpg multiple times will cause further degradation.  This happens even if you simply open up a jpg to view or look at it, no edits, and happen to click the 'Save' button again.