PP Spoiling my pictures

H

Humpty

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Edit My Images
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Wonder if someone might be able to offer me a bit of advice.

I have had a 50D for about a year now and LOVE the results I am getting from it when I see them on screen but am really dissapointed with processing. I have DPP 3.6 and find that most images just need a bit of sharpening and occasionally a few other minor adjustments then they are spot on. But as soon as I convert them to jpeg or tiff using DPP then they just loose all their sparkle and look distinctly average.

I also have CS3 but find that DPP makes the images look much better on screen.

What am I missing here? Can anyone give me some pointers? I feel like I must be missing something obvious but really can't fathom what it is! :bang: :bang:
 
Are you shooting raw? Could it be DPP using the in camera setting to generate the preview or something?
 
Thanks for the reply. Yes, I am shooting RAW. I have most of the in camera settings in terms of enhancement (NR, sharpening etc) turned off so the effect of that should be minimal.

My main problem is that the pictures do look great in DPP but they never look as good elsewhere (converted to jpeg, tiff, printed or opened in CS3). What am I doing wrong? Must be something in my work flow I guess.
 
Make sure you have the colour space in your camera, DPP and CS3 set to sRGB. It sounds like DPP may be set to Adobe RGB if your shots are looking distinctly different elsewhere.
 
Dont get upset with it Humpty, you dont want to be falling off that wall especially if you got your precious 50D slung around your neck :puke: I found the same thing as such when I started using the 50D. if I loaded a jpeg which I had just converted into photoshop it looked awfull as you say, but just try zooming in on the subject and you will see it in a different light so to speak. If you are talking about when viewing your pics on here then might I suggest this. When you have finished adjusting by all means do a crop but do not sharpen the image untill last thing. When you have got it looking as you want then try the following.
Resize the picture in photoshop to 1024 on the longest side
Use the sharpen filter once, and then resize that image to 800 on the longest side, post it up and see what you thinks. There are a few methods which people use for their work and none of them are the right way as such :D
 
Humpty said:
Thanks for the reply. Yes, I am shooting RAW. I have most of the in camera settings in terms of enhancement (NR, sharpening etc) turned off so the effect of that should be minimal.

My main problem is that the pictures do look great in DPP but they never look as good elsewhere (converted to jpeg, tiff, printed or opened in CS3). What am I doing wrong? Must be something in my work flow I guess.
Click to expand...

I have this feeling sometimes too - I do all my work in Lightroom within the sRBG colour-space and still, when I export to jpeg there's a subtle change.

I've been wondering if it's to do with the dynamic range of the file format - your eye sees a huge dynamic range, raw captures part of this and jpeg only encodes a smaller part again. I'm not talking about HDR processing here but rather the specification of each file type.:thinking:
 
Colour space is set to sRGB in camera, CS3 and DPP.

There's no danger of me falling off the wall u8myufo! It's just frustrating, I look at the images as RAW's with a bit of tweaking in DPP and have a nice feeling about it all. They look great. Some of them look fantastic! And then I show them to others as jpegs or prints and they look distinctly average!!

Interesting comment on the dynamic range Incapete, that might go some way to explaining it but it certainly doesn't cover everything.
 
What happens if you save as tiff instead of jpeg?
 
Good suggestion, I had that thought a while Robert. It is a slight improvement but the pictures still lack that 'wow' factor that they have when viewed as RAW files in DPP :shake:
 
Can you get them showing side by side (raw in DPP and Jpeg in your viewer program) on screen then save a screen capture? See if the screen capture has the difference in it or they both look the same.

Not sure where I'm going here but it might be interesting to see :)
 
This probably doesn't illustrate it too well but here goes. Screen cap cropped in CS3:

Beach.jpg


Not sure this really illustrates it too well but you can see some dirrefences. The image on the left is the RAW in DPP, the right is a jpeg in CS3. The jpeg colours aren't as rich. The blacks aren't as deep. When you actually see it on screen the difference is far more pronounced.
 
Yep I can see that, the RH image looks washed out.
 
Yep. That's what I'm talking about! I'm getting some really good shots but the only way to really show them off to their best is as RAW images in DPP. That can't be right, can it??
 
And yet it is the same image. The jpeg (RH) is just the RAW (LH) saved as a jpeg using the DPP 'Convert and save' option.
 
It's not the same image though.

Right is an image created from the source of the left.
DPP probably applying camera specific corrections

Left is 16bit Right is 8 Bit
Left is uncompressed Right is compressed

Open the RAW file in Photoshop, not the jpg and then see what they look like.

You shouldn't be working with jpg's for editing anyway.
 
My point about the images being the 'same' was just that the jpeg was generated from the RAW without any further adjustments being made. I am not editing the jpegs, I had done all the editing that I wanted in the RAW image.

So, back to the original problem: how do I generate jpegs that are as close as possible to the RAW file?
 
It must have something to do with DPP conversion. I use DPP and convert to tif and jpg and I have never noticed this deterioration. Have a god look through all the preferences in DPP and see if there is something set there that mght be doing this.
 
Are you printing out much and if so, how do the results fare in that respect?Better? Worse?

To me, the problem with viewing things on screen is that different software gives a different rendition of the image and although calibration should do away with any discrepancies between the on-screen image and how it prints out, there's no denying that on anything but the best monitors, images do look that little bit better...

...but it is annoying how some pieces of software don't have that oomph you want. I know the guys at work view their images in Preview on the mac, and Preview is horrid; everything goes soft, colours look either pale or over the top and it's nothing like the 'real' thing when you look at it in PS.

Suppose my point is there's nothing quite like a print; if it's spot-on then it'll blow you away, even from a consumer inkjet, whereas screen res just isn't a true indication at times....
 
Thats very true. SOmething that looks good on screen is usually awesome in print if you do it right
 
The reason I wanted to see a side by side screen capture is that the screen cap will have just one colour space, contrast settting... whatever variable you like. The screen may be able to display more colours on one image than the other but could a screen capture record them?

I use Lightroom and I had noticed that my output jpegs did not exactly match the preview I saw in lightroom. Having tweaked a raw image I expect my view of a jpeg created after a lightroom export to be similar. Having them side by side on the same screen i could see a difference. In my case I found output sharpening 'for screen' in the export dialog was making the changes. I turned that off and side by side images are now a pretty good match - and both look sharp. Are there any default output settings in DPP that you have set?
 
Thanks for the posts folks.

Printed results are also not as good as I would like.

Far and away the best image is achieved when it is viewed in DPP as a RAW file. I'll have a look at the various settings in DPP then post back.
 
Ok, had a bit more of a look at the settings in DPP. Can't see anything that might be affecting the outputted jpeg/TIFF files.

It must be something to do with the way that DPP displays the files. If I export a RAW file to a 16bit TIFF then view the two side by side in DPP then they are almost identical (which is what is wanted), but if I view the RAW file in DPP and put the TIFF in CS3 alongside it then there is noticible degradation in image quality: the blacks are greyer, the colour matching isn't as good and the image isn't as sharp.

What am I missing here? There must be some way to produce outputted files that look top quality in something other than DPP.

Once again, any help appreciated!
 
That makes me wonder if there is a setting in CS3 that's doing it but I'll need to investigate :)
 
Thanks Andy. It could be but I haven't managed to locate anything (not that my understand of CS3 is anything like as good as it should be!).
 
just guessing but it may be to do with monitor calibration settings chosen within DPP & CS3.

I know that DPP can override the system colour management settings

its in DPP its > Tools > Preferences > Colour Management tab
I'm not sure what all the settings mean but having played with them recently found they can do odd things . . . ooops

The same probably applies in CS3 but I don't have that. Worth checking if it is matched up to those set in DPP.
 
Wookie said:
just guessing but it may be to do with monitor calibration settings chosen within DPP & CS3.

I know that DPP can override the system colour management settings

its in DPP its > Tools > Preferences > Colour Management tab
I'm not sure what all the settings mean but having played with them recently found they can do odd things . . . ooops

The same probably applies in CS3 but I don't have that. Worth checking if it is matched up to those set in DPP.
Click to expand...

Agreed - I reckon it has to be a problem with those settings in DPP or similar ones in CS3.
 
Wookie said:
just guessing but it may be to do with monitor calibration settings chosen within DPP & CS3.

I know that DPP can override the system colour management settings

its in DPP its > Tools > Preferences > Colour Management tab
I'm not sure what all the settings mean but having played with them recently found they can do odd things . . . ooops

The same probably applies in CS3 but I don't have that. Worth checking if it is matched up to those set in DPP.
Click to expand...

You could be right. Thought I had checked all this but looking at the CS3 settings again there may be other options that are impacting things. I'll post back once I have had a chance to look into it. Thanks.
 
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