Saturday, September 10, 2011

DPP - a photographer friendly software


My recent discovery has been the joy of using Digital Photo Professional (DPP), a software that comes bundled along with Canon EOS cameras. Though I had been having the EOS 40D for almost 4 years, I never explored the DPP’s potential fully. I only used it for conversion of the RAW file to TIFF. Beyond that everything else was done in photoshop. Recently I discovered an interesting aspects of the Canon software. If you shoot in RAW, the white balancing can be done later on, after downloading the images to your system. And some of the preset picture modes offer you outstanding results, like the one I have given above as an example. I shot this VIT University student working on a lathe machine. She was lit up with small tungsten light attached to the machine. I shot it using a 70-200mm Canon lens at f 2.8. I had used the ‘auto white balancing’. While processing the image I just thought will play around with the image. So I opened the DPP and changed the white balance to ‘Tungsten’ and the result was unbelievable. Further I changed the picture mode from ‘standard’ to ‘portrait’ and the image just came alive. All it took was less than a minute. This is a software worth exploring. See for yourself the difference. The picture with a lot of yellow and seen at the bottom was the original. The one on top is the image after using DPP.