Raw processing in Canon Digital Photo Professional 4
Why not use Canon’s very own free software to process your Raw files?
m
any photographers head to Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom to process their Canon Raw files without even giving Canon’s own Raw conversion software
a thought! Digital Photo Professional is designed specifically to mimic the settings and colour rendition of your Canon camera precisely, more so than Adobe Camera Raw or other independent software.
For example, when you choose a Picture Style in Digital Photo Professional, you get exactly the rendition the camera would give with that setting. The same goes for white balance presets. Digital Photo Professional can also apply lens corrections to fix distortion and chromatic aberration, and offers sophisticated lens optimization algorithms to improve edge sharpness, for example.
01 picture Style
This shot was taken with the Faithful Picture Style, which gives the scene a rather flat and undersaturated appearance. When you shoot Raw, however, you can change the Picture Style in Digital Photo Professional to Monochrome, for example, or Landscape (our final choice here).
02 curves
This shot’s appeal is the contrast between the sunlit skyscrapers and the deep shadows in between
– a curves adjustment is ideal for bringing this out. Digital Photo Professional offers Luminance curve adjustments, favoured by experts because they change only contrast, not saturation.
03 tone adjustments
In addition to Curves, Digital Photo Professional offers some additional tonal controls. It’s possible to increase the brightness of the shadows in this picture, for example, and moving the Color tone slider to the left gives the late afternoon colours and slight red shift to enhance them even further.
04 white balance
Our Canon’s auto white balance has captured the late afternoon colours pretty well, but we can make sure by swapping to the Daylight presets. This ‘locks’ the white balance to regular, neutral daylight, so the extra warmth of the low afternoon sun is reproduced more accurately.
05 digital lens optimizer
If you’re shooting with a supported Canon lens, the Digital Lens Optimizer in Digital Photo Professional can counteract lens aberrations and increase the sharpness of fine details, especially towards the edges of the frame, revealing definition you might not have realized was there.
06 noise reduction
Digital Photo Professional is very good indeed at preserving image detail while controlling noise – it’s much better at this than Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom, for example. Noise shows up most in areas of even tone like skies, but with careful adjustments you can reduce it substantially.