Eos S.O.S

Another sack-load of your thorny photography questions tackled by Canon Agony Uncle Brian

Brian Says… Adobe’s free DNG converter converts modern camera Raw files to a DNG that can be opened in older versions of Photoshop and Lightroom. Each year there are advances in image processing in-camera and in the software, so you are not likely to get the full benefit of your EOS 80D Raw files, but the difference may be small.

Since you currently need to convert to DNG, you could alternatively use Canon Digital Photo Professional. It may have a clunky interface but it does produce some of the best image quality from the latest EOS cameras. You could export the best files as 16-bit TIFF images and then work with that in your version of Photoshop or Lightroom.

To speed up the process, make use of the batch function; it can run in the background while you keep using the software to optimize other images. Even in the latest versions of Photoshop and Lightroom I sometimes resort to using DPP to make a TIFF to extract the best quality from my own images.

Use Digital Photo Professional’s batch export to create high-quality TIFF images suitable for all versions of Photoshop and Lightroom

DPP creates superb images from Canon Raw files, while Digital Lens Optimizer is great for lenses too