Canons Digital Photo Professional (DPP) software

Rgollar · Jun 30, 2015

I have been doing a lot of reading from a very well known bird Photographer Arthur Morris. He is really big on using Canons Digital Photo dpp 4 software for his raw images vs Lightroom or Photoshop. Now I was very skeptical since the software was free. There is a downfall I did find with the software is it only supports very few canon cameras as of right now. But I do have some of the cameras it does support. So I gave it a try and I have to say I was blown away with how much less noise and the color retention difference I got straight out of the camera. Now I am sure Lightroom and adobe can do just as good if your very versed in these software. But a lot of very big name photographers seem to start with Canon Digital Photo dpp 4 software for raw. I was wondering if anyone else has found Canons dpp 4 raw converter to seem alot better quality for there pictures?

KenC · Jun 30, 2015

Rgollar said:
I have been doing a lot of reading from a very well known bird Photographer Arthur Morris. He is really big on using Canons Digital Photo dpp 4 software for his raw images vs Lightroom or Photoshop. Now I was very skeptical since the software was free. There is a downfall I did find with the software is it only supports very few canon cameras as of right now. But I do have some of the cameras it does support. So I gave it a try and I have to say I was blown away with how much less noise and the color retention difference I got straight out of the camera. Now I am sure Lightroom and adobe can do just as good if your very versed in these software. But a lot of very big name photographers seem to start with Canon Digital Photo dpp 4 software for raw. I was wondering if anyone else has found Canons dpp 4 raw converter to seem alot better quality for there pictures?

I use DPP (v. 3.15) most of the time to convert raw files. I've done a few side-by-side comparisons with ACR, the raw converter in all the Adobe programs and not seen much of a difference. I use DPP because it is faster for me and does the same thing, as far as I can tell. You can download the latest version from Canon and it should support all of their cameras, at least all the ones you list. Did you get a software disk with your recent cameras? They may have stopped doing this, but if you got one it should have a version of DPP that recognizes that camera and the other recent ones.

Rgollar · Jun 30, 2015

Yes I got the latest software loaded. I am just surprised at the difference I am seeing with version 4 especially for being free well not quite free had to buy the camera

Derrel · Jun 30, 2015

One summer, in the mid-2000's, 2007 I guess, I used Canon DPP, SilkyPix, MacBibble, Nikon Capture, and Adobe Camera Raw to do massive, bulk raw conversions of files shot with my Canon 5D and Nikon D2x cameras. It was really interesting to literally see the different interpretations the different software arrived at with batches of raw images converted to large, high-quality JPG files.

This was a while before raw conversion software became "smarter" and more capable. This was basically taking an entire day's worth of images, and then automatically batch-converting them using the basic, pre-determined profiles in the various applications. Many times the images would look similar. But on some images, one of the applications would produce a remarkable, beautiful, and very different image, one that truly stood out from the others.

The factory-produced raw developer may, or may not, give astoundingly good results; like so many things in life, there are exceptions, oddities, and accounting for luck and skill of the operator, but I think if a person owns multiple raw developer apps, he or she needs to assemble a collection of at least, let's say 40 or so raw files, and then just try batch-processing them using different application softwares, just to see how much variation there is. I THOUGHT at that time that "I knew what I wanted" from my files, but that summer taught me a lesson.

JacaRanda · Jun 30, 2015

I was too lazy to do it, but one fellow photographer uses DPP for his sharpening prior to using LR or PS for everything else.

PixelRabbit · Jun 30, 2015

I use DPP for a lot of my editing, I think the difference you see with colours etc is DPP applies in camera settings for things like picture style (landscape, etc...), each style comes with saturation, sharpening, and contrast settings for example, when I load the same raw file into Bridge these settings aren't recognized or applied and very often the image is more "dull" in Bridge than the same raw image loaded in DPP.

Rgollar · Jun 30, 2015

I think your right PixelRabbit on the camera settings loading with the raw file. What I am noticing more then anything is the noise is so much less with dpp. So I think I am going to add dpp to my work flow of pictures. I just purchased a article from arthur morris explaining what settings he uses and why dpp is part of his image editing. So far I like dpp for cleaning the noise and adobe photoshop for sharping and still love lightroom. But I have to say the more I dig into photoshop the more I am impressed with it. But get it right from the get go and there is little to edit. One thing I picked up that I never thought about when shooting birds is to make sure the sun is to your back so your shooting down your shadow and the wind is to your back because the birds land into the wind. Man I have spend 3 days reading on how to photographs birds now I need to go out and try some of it.

PixelRabbit · Jun 30, 2015

Ah, have fun with the birds! Another tip, a roosting bird will do something before it takes off (often they poop lol) so watch your bird and figure out what it does, makes them a liiiiittle more predictable!