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.