Canon’s Digital Photo Professional (DPP) is a free, and surprisingly powerful, image organising and editing application that ships in the box with every EOS camera. You’ll find DPP on the EOS Digital Solution Disk alongside other very useful Canon developed software, such as EOS Utility. CPN writer George Cairns takes a closer look at the capabilities of the DPP software up to version 3.13.0.
If you consider your RAW images files as digital negatives then, like traditional negatives, they need to be processed in order to reveal their true colours and tones. DPP has all the digital darkroom tools you’ll need to claw back highlight or shadow details, banish colour casts and crop to improve composition.
Digital Photo Professional is specially designed to work closely with your Canon EOS camera and lenses, thus enabling you to correct more challenging problems such as chromatic aberration and lens-related artifacts such as distortion and vignetting. In this article we’ll take you on a comprehensive tour of the powerful features of this Canon image processing software.
Keeping up to date and setting up
You can ask Digital Photo Professional to open specific file types – such as JPEGs, RAW files and TIFFs – after EOS Utility has imported them. The most current Digital Photo Professional software is version 3.13.0, but it’s well worth keeping DPP up to date. The latest version supports new Canon lenses and recognises RAW format files from the more recent Canon EOS DSLR cameras. If you’ve got an older version of DPP already installed on your computer it’s free to update it. Indeed, if you’ve lost your software disk, you can download and install DPP for free.
To download an update for DPP (or install it from scratch) just click here for the Canon Europe Download Center, then enter your country, product type and camera model details and select the ‘Software (drivers and applications)’ option. The menu will offer a variety of downloads such as ImageBrowser EX, EOS Utility and EOS Digital Solution Disk Software, so scroll down and click on the appropriate link to download DPP for Mac or Windows. While you’re there, you can also download a copy of the EOS Utility software. You will also find a copy of DPP’s manual, which will help you to further maxmise all of the functionalities of the software.
Once DPP and the EOS Utility have been installed, plug your Canon EOS camera into your computer. If you’ve already opened DPP you can choose ‘Tools > Start EOS Utility’ from the main window’s menu. In EOS Utility, go to ‘Preferences’ and choose ‘Linked Software’ in the drop-down menu. In the ‘Linked Software’ menu, choose ‘Digital Photo Professional’. Click ‘Register’, choose the file types that you want DPP to open as soon as the EOS Utility has imported them, then Click ‘OK’.
Quality control – ratings and check marks
As your digital collection continues to grow it can be an increasing challenge to manage it. By default most image processing apps display photos according to shooting date and DPP is no exception. However, DPP enables you to sort imported images by assigning ratings or check marks to them.
In DPP browse to a folder of imported shots in order to view them as thumbnails. You can choose ‘View > Large Thumbnail’ for a closer look, but to get a better idea of a shot’s quality choose ‘Tools > Start Quick Check tool’ (or click the ‘Quick Check’ icon). Here you can zoom in to check the focus – and even discover which autofocus point was used when capturing the shot. You can summon the shot’s metadata too, which helps you discover if a fast ISO speed setting is likely to add noise, for example.
You can use Quick Check to indulge in some quality control. Add a star rating (from 1 to 5) to highlight your favourite photographs, or assign a numerical check mark to sort shots by theme or type (such as landscape or portrait). Assign ratings and check marks to thumbnails in DPP’s main window.
Once you’ve rated or check marked your imported shots you can then use the ‘Sort’ menu to display the highest rated images at the top of the main window, or display them by their numerical check marks. You can also choose ‘View > Thumbnail with information’ to list metadata alongside each image. The handy histogram enables you to spot any images that might need exposure adjustment. You can also save specific files from any folder into the ‘Collection’ tab so they can be easily found later.
Click here to read the article in its entirety on Canon Professional Network website.
MichaelDanielHo.com
No comments:
Post a Comment