It seems to me there is an advantage to using a newer version of DPP to edit old CR2 files.
In 2019, we went to Denali National Park in Alaska, United States. The bus stopped on the park road at about mile 45, a place called the polychrome mountains overlook. I made several photos handheld with my EOS 80D and EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM lens.
Yesterday, I opened the CR2 files for 24 of those photos in DPP and saved 16 bit TIF files. (In the previouse version I had only used 20 images, 5x4). I improved white balance, added some saturation because the distance had softened colors, used digital lens optimizer which was not available for that camera in 2019 and disabled sharpening.
Today, I used hugin free software to make a mosaic of the portions of those photos that overlapped. All were autofocus and I ended up with one area not quite in focus, but it is a small portion of the total mosaic. I created all of the control points for hugin manually because I had not planned the overlap very well in 2019.
ISO 100, F/8, 1/200 second, focal length about 100mm
Encoded the result with jpegli. Reduced the size, but it is still huge. Used exiftool to restore some metadata and add IPTC metadata.
An older version of the mosaic is at: https://www.rsok.com/~jrm/2019_Alaska/2019aug09_denali_9475-9499.jpg CAUTION, the file is very large. My web page displaying the image is at: https://www.rsok.com/~jrm/2019_Alaska/2019aug09_denali_9475-9499.html
The images are too large for the forum software.
IPTC metadata viewer: https://getpmd.iptc.org/getpmd/?imgurl=https://www.rsok.com/~jrm/2019_Alaska/2019aug09_denali_9475-9...
I used graphicmagick to add a frame with caption to the completed mosaic.
