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So lets get to the good news about DPP, starting with the conversion quality. In a word, superb, especially at low ISOs. Only recently has it been surpassed, by Lightroom 3 / Photoshop CS5, and the difference is mainly at higher ISOs of 800 and up. At low ISOs like 100 and 200 DPP produces wonderful smooth, sharp images from Canon DSLRs.
DPP also has an extra that you wouldn’t expect in any free package. With many Canon lenses and Canon EOS DSLR cameras, DPP will provide optical corrections - removing any curved edges in pictures of buildings etc. As all modern zoom lenses have a fair amount of either barrel or pincushion distortion this is more useful than you might think, so it’s amazing to find it in a free package, although it only works with Canon lenses. If you want the same facility with say a Sigma lens on your Canon DSLR you’ll need DxO Optics Pro or Adobe Lightroom 3. DxO is the leader in this area - DPP does a good job but I’d only use the corrections when you need them as you do lose a little sharpness.
Speaking of sharpness - I find that Canon’s “Standard” setting can be horribly harsh at times so I usually set the “Picture Style” to “Faithfull” or “Neutral”. This takes out most of the harshness, but it also turns off all sharpening. Make sure you set sharpness to about 4 or 5 to restore a reasonable level - I tend to set between 4 and 7. Canon files are quite soft straight out of the camera so they need careful sharpening to get the best out of them.
The two more recent additions to DPP are proper noise reduction tools, and a straightening / trimming tool. Both of these work well, just not the same way as any other package. Why? I’ve no idea. Let start with the noise reduction - In most packages when you adjust the amount of NR the preview updates automatically to show the effect. Not with DPP. To see the effect on the whole image you have to press the “Apply” button and wait a few seconds for the preview to update, or you can press the “NR Preview” button and a small window will open allowing you to preview the NR on a tiny area of your image. It’s not the best, or simplest layout, but hey, it’s free and it works. You also only get a 1 - 10 scale rather than 1-100 in most packages, but 1-10 is way better than the Low - Medium - High DPP used to have. The “Straightening / Trimming Tool” is again a design unique to DPP, but it works well and allows you to output pretty much finished files, whereas in earlier versions lots still needed to be done in Photoshop after conversion.
DPP may not be perfect, but in comparison to other manufacturers free packages, DPP is in a class of it’s own. If you’ve just bought a Canon EOS DSLR, check you have the latest version and give it a try - you may never need anything else.
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