Software (contd).

Canon Digital Photo Professional (1.1.0.2)

Upon starting Digital Photo Professional you could be forgiven for thinking it is the same as EOS Viewer Utility (EVU), and to a large degree it is. However there are some subtle differences. Firstly the thumbnail view looks subtly different, the folder view is still there on the side but along the top is the oversized tool bar with big 'press here to adjust' buttons (mostly for RAW manipulation). There are also several things you can't do in DPP, you can't connect to an attached camera, you can change the camera settings, nor can you use DPP to transfer images from the camera to your hard disk. DPP also doesn't appear to understand RAW+JPEG and displays the two as separate images. Nor does it provide EVU's B&W mode.

Thumbnail index view

The main thumbnail view has three different size options as well as an interesting thumbnail with information view as seen below. Note that adjustments such as brightness and white balance can be made to single or multiple files (just like EVU) and are remembered across multiple sessions (although EVU and DPP don't appear to share this database of adjustments).

Edit image window

Select one or more images and click on the 'Edit image window' (or simply double click on a single image) to switch to the edit window where you can carry out various RAW adjustments such as digital exposure compensation, white balance, tone curve and color. Curiously DPP's sharpness setting is on the save dialog which means you can't tune (or store) a sharpness setting for each image. The shot below shows the oversized toolbar running along the top of the window, selected thumbnails down the left side (this can be turned off), a before and after (optional) view of the image in the center and adjustments to the right.

On the right side of the edit window are two pages of adjustments accessed by two tabs labeled 'RAW image adjustment' and 'RGB image adjustment'.

RAW image adjustment page	RGB image adjustment page

RAW adjustments which can be applied from the adjustment tabs:

* Note that sharpness setting is made at the time of output (the last thing to be carried out), and can be set in the range of 0 to 5 (click here).

DPP 'Faithful color' reproduction

Digital Photo Professional has two standard color adjustment modes of 'Shot' and 'Faithful'. These can produce quite different color responses from images, in some circumstances the Faithful setting delivers very impressive results (although in others can mean the clipping of color channels). According the the DPP manual "a feature of EOS DIGITAL cameras, are settings that are faithful to the original image. This setting adjusts colors so that the images that are taken in an ambient light of approx. 5200 K can be colorimetrically faithful to the subject's color tones."

All the samples below were originally 20D RAW files output from DPP as JPEG and reduced to XGA dimensions. Each file was converted with both the 'Shot' and 'Faithful' color adjustment settings. It's probably worth knowing that DPP's 'Shot' color adjustment setting is less saturated than straight out of the camera JPEG and default output from EOS Viewer Utility (see next page).

DPP color adjustment 'Shot'	DPP color adjustment 'Faithful'