Reviews: Canon's DPP 2.03 is a major upgrade that all photogs should download; iCorrect EditLab is a powerful color correction plugin; Edirol R1 Audio Recorder provides great field recording power.Canon DPP V2.0
As I described in an earlier column entitled "Raw Format Is a Lifesaver," all digital SLRs can write not only JPEG files, but also their own proprietary file format generically called Raw.
The Raw format offers the photographer maximum flexibility, but special conversion software is needed to decode Raw files and generate the standard JPEG or TIFF files which every image processing program can read.
DPP is short for Digital Photo Professional. Canon supplies DPP for free with its pro and prosumer cameras, while Nikon charges their users about $100 for Nikon Capture.
Adobe's Photoshop and Adobe Elements also include a bundled Raw converter plugin. However, users with a recent digital camera need to update to the latest Photoshop or Elements to be able to decode their Raw files.
Let me repeat, DPP is free, if you have a Canon SLR.
Canon's latest DPP, 2.03, has been released contemporaneously with the 5D and 1DIIN pro cameras, whose files it can decode.
However, this is a major upgrade, which all Canon users should download. Existing Canon users may get the new DPP via the Canon site.
A Raw converter is the place where the exposure of an image can be adjusted within a few stops. It's also the right place for fine-tuning color.
Many photographers also perform a first pass of sharpening, called "capture sharpening" immediately after conversion. All of these operations greatly impact the appearance of a photograph.
DPP's sharpening set at a fairly low strength (three out of 10) seems to exactly compensate for the anti-alias filter in my 1DsII.
The result is that I'm getting a level of detail from my high-end camera that I've never before seen. Also, high-ISO shots seem to show less noise when converted in DPP, compared with Photoshop.
In a way, Picture Styles are an attempt by Canon to make available to the digital photographer the choices that a film shooter makes when he purchases a specific emulsion.
At a glance, the Landscape Style has much of the over-saturated punchy look of Velvia. Maybe the Portrait Style emulates Portra?
In the future, Canon should throw open the format describing a Picture Style so that third parties could release more such "digital emulsions." In fact, I'd like to see this as a standard feature of Photoshop, too.
iCorrect EditLab
Photoshop itself provides plenty of native functionality for color correction, but it's actually pretty hard to use except if you're a specialist.
With iCorrect EditLab, Pictocolor has had the nice idea of providing a sort of assistant that forces the user to take the basic correction steps in the right order.
When you invoke the plugin, it asks you to locate color casts in a photo, and determine the black point, the white point and the middle tones of your image by clicking.
Then you are offered the possibility to fine tune brightness and saturation, and lastly you get to a hue adjustment tool that offers a final tuneup.
In my testing, EditLab livened a portrait shot in about 5 clicks, and neutralized a catastrophic color cast in an interior shot in a way that I would never have managed by using Photoshop alone.
But the preview window in which you click with the eyedroppers is too small. Could we have a resizable preview please?
What's the future of windows color management? Click here to read more.
Anyone needing to color-correct photos would benefit from using this plugin. Experts faced with difficult color casts induced by mixed lighting might find it equally useful.
Just the first two screen's functions would justify purchasing this $100 product by the time gained in a production environment, when speed is essential.
In any case, readers will be able to make up their own minds by test-driving the demo available from the manual, especially before attempting to use the hue editor.
Edirol R1 Audio Recorder
The Edirol R1 is a pocket-sized device that writes audio files to CF cards.
The R1 can record from built-in stereo microphones, and my tests indicate it yields decent speaker separation even in extremely noisy interview environments.
The R1 allows half-speed playback, with no pitch change. This can make life much easier when transcribing. It has a fairly short battery life—about 2.5 hours when recording—and a toy-like case that means it needs protection in the field.
However, the sound quality from the R1 amazed me. Recording can take place at 24 bits WAV format, in addition to MP3. And of course, the playback of Wav files ripped from a CD turns the R1 into a hi-fi enthusiast's dream iPod, at a price of around $499.
Indeed it would seem that the live recording scene prefers this fragile unit's sound to the much more professionally built Marantz PMD-660.
