Canon editing software

[almejia]

I will greatly appreciate any and all comments about Canon’s Digital Photo Professional compared to Photoshop Lightroom and Photoshop CS2. Any suggestions as to where to invest the learning curve time, please?

Thank you very much in advance for your help.
Alvaro

[marxz]

Lightroom is easier/more powerful than the Canon software.
I would spend 9/10'ths of my time learning lightroom (which is very intuitive anyway) and Photoshop.

even if you're doing RAW importing in DPP you'd be wanting to save them as high quality TIFF (or similar) so as to get the most out of editing them in Lightroom or Photoshop.

Particularly on the Mac side of thing Canon's DPP software is poorly designed, has an archaically bad interface that looks like some sort of throwback to Mac System 7 and is frustrating to use.

that said the canon software does some, mostly esoteric, stuff that Lightroom can't do (or needs canon's DPP software installed and running to do) such as remote capture.

[dougj]

I'll approach this from a different perspective. DPP is only a RAW converter, not an image editor, so it is very simple in operation and easy to learn. I've compared the Windows version of DPP to Adobe Camera RAW (ACR), Raw Shooter Essentials and another one or two. I haven't used Lightroom so I can't comment on using it. I understand a lot of folks use it, and are quite satisfied. I'm sure Marxz is making a good recommendation.

I prefer DPP because it has built in recognition and correction for vignetting, CA and lens distortions for *some* of the Canon lenses. As long as you're not using Vista, DPP will do a transfer of a converted image to PhotoShop after you're done with the conversion.

DPP includes noise reduction, which I don't think works well at all. There are much better NR programs & techniques.

ACR is a good converter as well, I'm OK with either one. I lean towards ACR as I'm using Vista and don't want to convert a file, save as a TIFF and open in PS. When Canon fixes the direct transfer from DPP to PS I'll probably switch back to DPP.

If you've installed the Canon software, you probably installed DPP. You can get the update, if applicable, and try it. The learning curve is very short, and it will provide you with more background to help you evaluate your needs and other programs.

[softix]

I've been into digital photography for about 2 months or so and tried PaintShop Pro initially. However, as others have said, I swapped to Photoshop and currently use that and the 'diluted' version - Photoshop Elements, for my main manipulations.

[macmahon]

Alvaro
As Doug says, DPP is a RAW convertor. I've used it, and have also used Lightroom, Bibble Pro, and Aperture which are also RAW convertors. Lightroom, BibblePro and Aperture all have extra adjustment capabilities that make them more useful (or destructive!!!) than DPP.

I always shoot RAW files and seldom make any adjustments that cannot be made in Lightroom (or Aperture, or BibblePro) Their interfaces are quite different but each is easy to learn.

Bibble needs 3rd party plug-ins to achieve all of what Lightroom and Aperture can do (and its Mac version has a broken print interface which is a bother if you are a Mac user).

FWIW I currently use Lightroom and am very happy with results.

If you never shoot RAW you don't need any of them. Photoshop CS (or Photoshop Elements) provide tools for playing with JPEG, TIFFs etc. and also have ACR attached if you do come across the odd RAW file.

Cheers

Tim