Sharing my Canon DPP 4 workflow

I'm glad this thread was revived. I hadn't seen it before. It has a lot of great information and advice.

I too find DPP 4 to be quite capable. It is slow but that's for a reason --- it's a lot of processing for some of the features, and the results are worth it. it's my first-stage processing for all my RAW files, and for most of them it's all I need. Occasionally I'll use some of the de-noising and fine contrast settings in darktable, if I can't get the result I want from DPP alone.

For the most part I follow similar workflows and agree with the comments about control over sharpness, gamma, lens corrections and so on. I think DPP is quite underrated.

Occasionally if the image needs a more fine-tuned approach than using DPP's basic controls, I appreciate the ability to control the 'curve' for all or individual color channels, and also like the custom color sliders a lot.

For sharpness, I'd like to point out that DPP gives you the capability to get extremely, extremely sharp photos at the pixel resolution (if that's needed - perhaps for extreme cropping or very large final images sizes). With a relatively low ISO (as close to 100 as possible) and a very sharp lens like the EF-M 22mm f2 or EF-M 11-22 IS STM, it's possible to use sharpness strength 10 with fineness and threshold both set to 0 in DPP.

You might be amazed how much fine detail and texture is in your images at those sharpness settings, at the pixel level. Here's an example with one of my sharpest vintage lenses, a Minolta MD (iii) 50mm f2 lens, used at f8, ISO 100. Being a vintage lens, no lens corrections were applied.

I haven't been able to get such sharp results with other software, processing Raw files.

Canon M6ii, vintage Minolta MD (iii) 50mm f2 lens at f8, 1/640s, ISO 100

I had some fun doing this in DPP4 using the brush tool. I wasn’t super careful with the edges. Just playing around.

I’ve also used the clone brush to clean up some images where it was a quick shot out the car window and the door frame intruded into the corner of the image.  Cloned the sky and made the door frame disappear.

I also use it for focus stacking like the image below:

I don’t recall how many images, but this was done using auto focus bracketing in camera and stacked in DPP4.

I like DPP4 and have used it for a long time. I run Linux and have been able to get DPP4 working with Wine, although the last time I tried I needed to do some convoluted workarounds to get it installed (it works fine once installed). See here: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/64612633

Lately, though, I've been using Darktable more often. The motivating reason was that I got a Sony camera for my kite aerial photography hobby and didn't want to have to use two different postprocessing tools. Darktable has come a long way since I last used it several years ago. After a little bit of getting used to it and saving some presets, I find I'm able to get comparable or better results with to DPP4 most, at least for the things I care about, without spending much more time. (I don't know about detail at pixel peeping levels, since I don't normally worry about that. The sharpness appears close enough to the same to me.) One thing that is a lot harder is to get nice skin tones, though, especially in low light. But it has a lot of other features that DPP4 lacks, most notably selective editing with masks for pretty much all of its modules. The other thing is that I find DPP4 slow to the point that it is annoying, but that may be partly due to running it with Wine. Darktable is much snappier.

Overall I still like both tools but will probably mainly use Darktable from now on, occasionally doing comparisons with DPP4. Actually, doing these kinds of comparisons helps me get better with both, since sometimes I see something I like about one and then go figure out how to emulate it in the other.