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I'm fairly new to photography, and I've been trying out a few image editors, and I stumbled upon one issue: any program that can read Canon's raw files, except Canon's Digital Photo Professional, doesn't display the raw images as I intended them to be. Canon's software is the only one that's able to interpret my image settings I set in camera, like contrast and saturation, while any other program seems to disregard these settings. I have tried Picasa, Lightroom, and now I have GIMP with UFRaw. My camera is Canon 400D (or Rebel XTi in US I think, 10MP model). Is there any solution to it, or do I have to stick with configuring RAW files in Canon DPP and then converting the image to e.g. JPEG before using other editors?

Thanks, Radek

andrus108
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  • I think any answer here would have to be per-converter, not in general. – mattdm Nov 20 '12 at 17:58
  • Honestly, I prefer to see a general one. Otherwise we may end up with a matrix of questions for all combinations of cameras and converters! – Itai Nov 20 '12 at 18:43
  • Heres a list of Convertors you might want to look at: DPP, Capture One Pro, Phocus, Adobe Camera Raw (Photoshop, Lightroom) The industry favorite in my circles is Capture One. Though I find people using a combination of all of these programs from testing,shooting,jpg previews and post. – underarock Nov 28 '12 at 18:13

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Replace any camera brand in your question and the issue and answer will still be the same. There was someone asking about the same thing for Fuji a few days ago.

The manufacturer converter often is programmed with the same conversion as the camera while third-party software have to roll their own. You are always likely to see a difference. Even with Lightroom's As Shot option, to me it looks dramatically different. You have to find a software which can produce the look you like. On most you can make the workflow efficient by creating a Preset that applies the same settings to images as they are imported.

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Itai
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  • Ok, thanks for your answer! So, is my second option, converting to JPG before post-processing, any viable, or is it better in general to edit on RAW? – andrus108 Nov 20 '12 at 22:23
  • @andrus108 - There is another option and that is to convert to a high bit-depth format like TIFF 48-bits (16 bits-per-component) it has the WB and demosaic baked-in (unlike RAW) but keeps all the precision of your RAW images (which are 12-bit and 14-bits on some cameras). JPEG is certainly viable for minimal edits but if you do things like play with curves, particularly in the dark areas, go for higher bit-depth. – Itai Nov 20 '12 at 22:58