RAW-to-JPEG conversion in DPP - why so soft?

<p>A couple of weeks ago, I took some informal photos of friends with my 5DmkII. Instead of using Photoshop or importing them into Lightroom I thought I'd take the quick and dirty approach, adjust them slightly in DPP and then convert them to JPEG format.</p>

<p>Wow! To say that the results were disappointing would be an understatement. When I open the JPEG files in any program other than DPP they look ridiculously soft. And I had sharpened them in DPP!</p>

<p>Looks like I'll have to bite the bullet and go back to my normal workflow. Good riddance, DPP!</p>

<p> </p>

<p>DPP is very good! I save my 7D pix to DPP, work on them and then transfer a TIFF to CS2 and I have no problems. Any JPEG I produce from CS2 is OK.</p>

<p>I suppose you don't know how to perform sharpening.<br>

I used a sharpening value of 6 (oversharpned), just to show you the result.</p><div></div>

<p>Now the sharpening 6 result</p><div></div>

<p>

<p>I have had mixed results with DPP, sometimes it gives me very sharp images, sometime I have to use PSE to get a really sharp image. Have you tried converting the raw images with Photoshop to make sure the images really are sharp?</p>

<p>I did a quick test on one of my raw photos and DPP seemed to have produce the sharper image<br>

100% crops are below, from a 50D using a 50mm f/1.8 lens at f/8<br>

Here is from DPP <br>

<a title="converted with DPP by KonaScott, on Flickr" href=" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4016/4448068549_68cc876d61_o.jpg" alt="converted with DPP" width="700" height="700" /></a></p>

<p>And here is from Photoshop Elements </p>

<br>

<a title="Converted with PSE by KonaScott, on Flickr" href=" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2709/4448068733_d9d98e339d_o.jpg" alt="Converted with PSE" width="700" height="700" /></a><br>

ANy one who wants to play with the raw file it can be found here<br>

<a href="http://sewcon.com/raw/IMG_2108.CR2">http://sewcon.com/raw/IMG_2108.CR2</a></p>

 

<p>There was also a bug in in DPP not long ago. It would default to a value of "2" for <strong>luminance</strong> noise reduction, which smeared detail in the image.<br>

That was corrected in an update and now it applies "2" for chrominance noise again, which is fine.</p>

<p>My workflow seems to be the same as Frederick's. I shoot in RAW and for most files do the initial processing in DPP, then transfer it to CS2 where I will do my cropping, resizing, sharpening. Probably 90% of what I shoot gets converted to B&W and I use CS2 for that. Normally I set sharpening and noise reduction to 0 in DPP. If I need noise reduction I use the Noise Ninja plug-in.<br>

Just for the heck of it after reading your post I used just DPP. The sharpening results were fine but I didn't try different sizes of prints which I imagine could be a factor also.<br>

Are you using the latest version? DPP is now at Version 3.8.0.0 so you may want to download the newest version if you don't have it and see if that makes a difference.</p>

Not only do my pictures look better in DPP, so do my prints. Whenever I convert to CS2 the pictures luminance and sharpness drop down a couple of notches. If there is no need for Photoshop, I do all my work in DPP.

<p>Is it possible you didn't actually save a sharpened file, or else you ended up not applying sharpening or enough of it, for some reason. I forget exactly how I did it, but a few times, I thought I had done sharpening, but I managed to convert/save to a jpeg with nothing applied to it. Now, that's pretty ugly.</p>

<p>I'm pretty sure there's no problem with DPP. I just used it yesterday to get this picture.</p><div></div>