Image straightening, DPP wishes, and kill Zoombrowser

The latest version of Canon's Digital Photo Professional software (v3.8) is due to be released soon, and it's bringing the ability to straighten images -- a feature whose absence has often added steps to my own workflow. It probably won't be as easy as Lightroom's straighten tool, where you basically just draw a line across the image and LR rotates the image until it's straight, but however they implement it will be a lot easier than moving the whole image into a second editor.

DPP is pretty handy. I wish the Edit Image and Main windows were better integrated, and until it lets you edit metadata it's going to be basically useless for most serious workflows, but it's not hard to use and the image quality is fantastic. There are a few things I would really, really like to see though.

First: Smarter sharpening tools. I don't mind if they're a bit slower than Lightroom's fantastic mask-based sharpening tool or a high-pass filter overlay in Photoshop, but they do need to give similar control. Right now the sharpening tool is a blunt instrument that beats your image softness into submission, instead of a subtle precision tool.

Second: Better batch tools. There's no easy way to copy individual settings across multiple images. You can copy and paste a 'recipe', as Canon calls it, from one to several, but you can't tell it what that recipe includes or excludes. I may want a consistent white balance across a whole shoot, but groups of photos with different exposure and sharpness needs. This should be an easy feature to add, so perhaps I'm just missing it.

Third: Ditch Zoombrowser and integrate metadata editing into DPP. That's the only thing ZB can do that DPP and EOS Utility can't. Zoombrowser might have a place for point-and-shoot users who aren't shooting RAW and just need basic editing and library tools, but there's really no need for it to be part of the EOS software suite, except for metadata. And honestly, given the alternatives out there, Zoombrowser looks and feels like legacy junkware: iPhoto, Picasa, and the built-in Windows media tools, all handle basic adjustments, library organization, and metadata better than ZB does. If it's easier for me to deal with keywording after I've uploaded my images than it is to use the bundled software that handles keywording, then there's something wrong with the bundled software. DPP should have a metadata tab in the Edit Image window, and it should be easy to batch edit multiple images.

(I know that one was a bit of a sidetrack, but as long as Canon thinks of Zoombrowser as a useful part of the EOS software suite, DPP's not going to get decent metadata tools.)

My last and biggest wish for DPP is smart noise reduction. I'm actually really happy with the NR tools in general, but there's an opportunity here for Canon to make them even easier and faster. Here's my thinking: Canon knows how my 40D's sensor generates noise in response to ISO and exposure adjustments. It knows how that's different from the sensor in a 1D or 1000D. What I want DPP to do is look at those factors in each RAW image and figure out how much luminance and chrominance noise reduction to apply. Give us defaults to tell it what baseline to go for, like "light", "average", or "heavy", and then DPP can set the NR sliders for us. It would take some cleverness to add this feature, but the hard part -- understanding the sensors and the RAW data -- is already done. It'd be taking advantage of Canon's main strength in the post-processing arena, which is why you'd use DPP in the first place.

I don't honestly need DPP to connect to online services or handle other post-export file handling, though I wouldn't necessarily mind it as long as my other wishes come true first. I don't really need brush adjustments either. There are things that Lightroom and Aperture will always do better than DPP, and for the price I don't mind going over to GiMP or some other third-party program to do them. The fine line, for me, is where the third-party programs sit in the workflow. If I'm moving an image to GiMP, I don't want to spend more time waiting for it to open than I spend actually doing whatever it is I need to do. So picking out dust spots is fine, but sharpening is not.

Digikam

I'm a long-time user of Linux, and one of the minor annoyances I put up with in photography is the need to use Windows for an efficient workflow with good post-processing control. I've been dual-booting with Ubuntu for about a year now, and had frankly stopped really using it because of a few problems I was never able to resolve. I've always been more of a Gentoo guy, and what with their tenth anniversary this month, I decided to switch back. Except for this past year, I've used it as my primary OS since 2002, so even though it's a lot more DIY, I'm quite comfortable with it.

Anyhow, I've been looking more seriously into Linux RAW processing software. I know there are some really powerful options out there, but I honestly find a lot of that power is more than I need. I've currently got the latest beta of Digikam installed and I think it's about 95% of what I want, but there's still a lot I need to learn about it.

I'll be looking closely at its output later, and hopefully it'll turn out to be a good alternative to Lightroom or even DPP.

Lightroom vs. DPP comparison

Update: I see Google still sends people here when they look for this comparison, so I'd like to point out that this post is outdated.  Lightroom 3's noise reduction is much, much better than either of these two, and I don't have any of these problems with it.

I've put together two 100% crops of a recent picture, comparing the results from Lightroom 2.5 and Digital Photo Professional 3.6.1. Where I could, I processed them identically, but generally speaking Lightroom has much finer control than DPP, so to a degree I had to just ask myself how I'd normally process the image in that program.


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View original

The comparisons show the problem I have with Lightroom: the JPGs I get out of it lose their texture to noise. The second crop is a perfect example. There are places that are much sharper in LR, like the tip of the flower bud, but towards the edges of the in-focus region, the fine detail is lost in the noise very quickly, and there's even some color banding in the bokeh. The DPP crop, though not as detailed in the in-focus areas, doesn't have that harsh, noisy, almost plastic texture to the bokeh and nearly-bokeh regions. Lightroom's sharpening tool, incidentally, can mask out the low-detail regions, so it didn't touch the areas I'm unhappy with.

This image was shot at ISO 200, with +0.33 exposure in both LR and DPP. Noise reduction is 3 luminance and 1 color in DPP; 24 luminance and 34 color in LR. (The DPP scale is 0-20, LR is 0-100. The color slider doesn't have much effect in either on this image, as long as it's not 0.) I don't see much improvement in LR's noise reduction below about 90, which seems unbelievably high for an ISO 200 image from a 40D, even with the background a stop or two intentionally underexposed. So I don't know what's going on here -- I have to assume I'm missing something. Do I just need to crank up the noise reduction?

Lightroom

I'm playing with the Adobe Lightroom trial again. I've used it in the past and wasn't happy with the JPGs I got out of it: there was a weird plastic texture that I think had to do with noise reduction, and the contrast just didn't seem quite there. Canon's DPP gave me much better results in that regard, even though the organization, tagging, and interface are so poor, so I never made the jump to Adobe.



But lately, the workflow issues around DPP have just gotten to me. I've caught myself letting photos sit on the camera because I don't want to deal with the ordeal of processing them in DPP. Don't get me wrong: individual photos are fine to work with, but sorting through 200 shots, deleting the rejects, and then getting to the individual picks is a pain. And that's not even looking at DPP's total inability to handle data like tags and captions, which means my DPP workflow often has to involve two, three, or sometimes four separate programs to get my work online. And Lightroom can do all that stuff easily.



So, I'm reading up on Lightroom again, and already found some good advice for dealing with sharpening and tone curves in it. I'm looking through old favorites to see what I can do with them, and we'll see how it goes.

Taking the pictures

These first few posts will be mostly introductory. My equipment is pretty modest. I have a Canon system, a Rebel XT and two good prime lenses (the EF 50mm f/1.8 II and the EF 100mm f/2.8 USM macro), along with a Vivitar 285HV flash and some pretty nifty Cactus V2 wireless triggers to use the flash off-camera. I also have two Canon kit zoom lenses (the EF-S 15-55mm II and EF 28-80mm II) and while neither are very good at all, I sometimes take one out for a spin to take advantage of the wider angle photos I can get with them. The ladybug photo to the right was taken with the 28-80mm, so it's not that you can't get good results with them, it's just easier to get good results with nearly any other modern lens...

At home, I use the flash for pretty much every photo I take, even if it's just semi-mindless snapshotting my roommate's cats. It's not a TTL flash that the camera can control, so I leave the camera in full manual mode, set the shutter speed to 200 (my camera's max sync speed -- any faster and I'll see the shutter's shadow in the image), and control the image via the aperture (f/8 or thereabouts is good) or the flash's power setting. I would definitely say that I wasn't getting my money out of the macro lens until I picked up the flash and trigger.

When I'm out on a photowalk, I don't usually bring the flash along. I'll shoot in Aperture-priority mode and usually aim for f/5 to f/8. Though I don't have tremendous flexibility in focal range with these two lenses, they are both tack-sharp with excellent bokeh (the quality of the out-of-focus areas of the image), and so many of my images end up being, essentially, plant or object portraits.

I'm finding myself using full manual mode more often as I get more proficient with it. Frankly the Rebel XT doesn't make it easy to use -- you have to hold down a button on the back of the camera while you turn the adjustment dial to change the aperture -- but the more I do it, the more I like having that control.

Next, I'll talk more about my digital workflow, once I've gotten the photos from the camera onto the computer.