The “jaggies” in Canon’s Digital Photo Professional 3.0.1
Introduction
May 15, 2007, updated May 16, 2007
* Digital Photo Professional 3.0.1.5 [view]
PROBLEM FOUND—check your Digital Photo Professional preferences!
I feel like I’ve been led on a wild good chase, including reinstalling DPP, removing RAM, etc. It turns out that the image quality problems described on this page were caused by my own mistake (or so it seems) of at some point having set to .
In DPP 2.2., the preference dialog looks like this (below). Note that still produces “Quality” output.
In 3.0, Canon changed the prefs as shown below. It’s far from clear that means “awful quality” with some images. Why would anyone want to output a 16-bit TIF file with substandard quality? Never understimate the temptation for engineers to add idiotic and poorly-explained options—the software equivalent of buried land mines.
In Raw-file Converters, the image quality characteristics of nine different raw file converters for Canon and Nikon RAW files were explored. One conclusion was that Canon’s DPP (Digital Photo Professional) did quite a respectable job, excepting the “zipper effect” noted in D2x vs EOS well over a year ago.
Unfortunately, Canon has taken a major step backwards by introducing a serious flaw which has dramatic ill effects, especially noticeable with infrared images.
Color images
Color images are also affected, but the effect is usually less obvious. Robgalbraith.com reports on this with respect to the new Canon EOS 1D Mark III:
The Jaggies Canon's image processing - whether in-camera, in RAW Image Task or in Digital Photo Professional - tends to introduce jagged edges to bright reds and oranges in particular, and to a lesser extent bright blues. The effect is the most pronounced when Digital Photo Professional is doing the processing. The effect is noticeable in an unsharpened photo, and blatant in a sharpened one.
It seems that there is a natural tendency of DPP to produce jagged edges. Rob Galbraith tells me that version 2.2 and 3.0 both produce the jaggies shown in his 1D Mark III report, and confirms these also occur with EOS 1D Mark II N images.
no explanation for 2.2.0 vs 3.0.x change
In spite of the preceeding comments on color images, this does not explain the big change from 2.2.0 to 3.0.1 shown here in this article. It seems to be a general problem with DPP 3.0.1 (and likely 3.0.0—not tested), since the problem occurs with every Canon EOS 5D infrared image that I’ve shot in the past year. DPP 2.2 simply does not show the problem.
Testing done using the Mac OS X versions of Digital Photo Professional 3.0.1. Whether the Windows version has the same problem has not been invesigated by the author.
Blue channel ugliness
The visual change is dramatic. The blue channel from an image processed in DPP 3.0 shows incredibly jagged edges. As I often prefer the blue channel for infrared work, this is a major setback, and precludes further use of DPP 3.0. The actual pixels crops below demonstrate the dramatic change.
DPP 3.0.1, blue channel
DPP 2.2, blue channel
Red channel ugly too
The red channel is also affected and looks pretty awful as well.
DPP 3.0.1, red channel
DPP 2.2, red channel
Green channel
The green channel seems to be largely unaffected, but note the two fine wires coming together at top center—the DPP 3.0 rendition shows more pixellation (less smooth).
DPP 3.0.1, green channel
DPP 2.2, green channel
Ugliness not confined to diagonal lines
The problems are not confined to thin or diagonal lines; a nasty-looking speckled pattern can be seen all over the image, a “fairy dust” effect (evil fairies). Just try sharpening such garbage; the image “falls apart” very quickly.
| Blue Channel | |
|---|---|
| DPP 3.0.1 |  |
| DPP 2.2 |  |
What about other raw-file converters?
Adobe Camera Raw CS3 has no such issues. Here is the blue channel with very nicely rendered diagonal lines.
DPP 2.2, red channel
One more example
Here’s another supremely ugly example, in case you’re not persuaded. It looks like a badly acquired image from interlaced video.
Digital Photo Professional 3.0.1, blue channel
Conclusions
An infrequently-discussed issue with raw file converters is that software providers can change image processing algorithms with any new release, and not always for the better.
- All providers of raw-file conversion software ought to provide the ability to specify a rendering engine of any older version, so that past results can be repeated for future work.
- They also ought to specify what changes they’ve made to their image processing algorithms, preferably with examples showing the new behavior.
- They ought to test their software before releasing it. It is hard to believe that the gross degradation in quality seen with DPP 3.0 could pass even the most basic quality control checks.
Canon’s Digital Photo Professional 3.0.1 should be excluded from consideration until Canon fixes this latest bug, at least for infrared work. In the meantime, version 2.2 appears to suffer no such problem, though that is of little consolation to those contemplating new Canon EOS cameras, such as the 1D Mark III.
It almost makes me want to reconsider my Goodbye Nikon article. Will Canon listen and fix this problem? If you have a contact at Canon, please let me know so I can pass this article along for their attention.
See also
Free Articles
Digital Photo Professional Batch Processing Performance Tip
Digital Photo Professional Preview Inaccuracy
Contact: email a comment on this article.
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