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Originally Posted by Octane
Just a general comment.
I have mentioned this before on this forum, several times, I'm sure.
I honestly don't understand the mindsets of people who bag Digital Photo Professional.
You go out and spend many thousands of dollars on Canon camera bodies, and, then, many thousands of dollars on beautiful L-series lenses. We're talking fairly hefty investments. It doesn't matter if you're a professional or an amateur, it's still a lot of money.
One then goes out and buys Lightroom or uses ACR to process the Canon RAW files. Does it not bother you, one iota, when you're importing the files into Bridge/ACR or your Lightroom library, that, at first they look wonderful, then, a moment later, something happens, and the files get aped?
Does it not bother you that a tone curve is being applied by that software to try and approximate the output that your thousands of dollars of investment have tried to capture? People then say that they calibrate the software using Xrite charts, or, by using "camera profiles" that others have prepared -- shouldn't you be getting what your hard earned money captured, up front, without you having to try and dodge your way through the process?
Canon provides you, for free, an amazing application, that decodes, processes and displays, properly what your camera/lenses captured and not what Adobe thinks you captured. That is, it's not an approximation.
When I was uninformed, I used to use Lightroom to process my wedding photographs, until one day I got jack of the skin tones being aped. I was wondering why on earth the images were being changed on import. I went through every setting, every menu, to see if I could disable the auto-fix or whatever it was it was doing. I couldn't find anything. Only after scratching my head, and reading posts online, did I find out the reason why -- initially, the embedded JPG thumbnail is being displayed before the tone curve apes the RAW.
The only reason we see posts about excessive banding (apart from people not knowing the limitations of their hardware, and/or how to expose/bracket their subjects appropriately) is because Lightroom/ACR allows you to push the RAW by 4 stops. There's a reason why Digital Photo Professional allows you just 2 stops of latitude. The authors of the software intimately know the design and limitations of the sensors that are in their hardware. They figure that 2 stops of latitude ought to be enough (and, in my experience, it is). Any more than that, and, you're going to start showing imperfections. And, that is fine! There's no perfect camera. You want more dynamic range? Go shoot film, or buy a 16-bit system.
I see posts about Digital Photo Professional's interface being clunky? Seriously, there's three tabs with all the basic adjustments you could require. It is fast and responsive on both my PC and my Mac. While you fiddle with a million different sliders in ACR/LR/DxO/Bibble/Capture One/blah/blah/blah, etc., DPP users breeze through their images with 3 tabs. One of which fixes all chromatic aberration, lens distortions, vignetting (if need be), with its own database of Canon lenses and extenders. If a shot needs more done to it, there's a reason why there's a transfer to Photoshop option.
I implore everyone to give DPP another go to get the most out of their images. Spend less time processing and on the computer, and more time shooting.
I know that at the end of the day, it really depends on how anal you are, or how purist you are. I just feel that I should get the most out of my images with the software that the vendor of my hardware authors. After all, they know best. Everything else is just reverse engineered -- even if Canon provides them (third party developers) their RAW decoding APIs and SDKs, why do they all look different to DPP?
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