It’s face-off time: Adobe Lightroom (LR) vs. Canon Digital Photo Professional (DPP). Rrrraaahhhhh!!!
Background: I started shooting exclusively in RAW…not that long ago. Perhaps a year ago. The first “real” set of photographs I shot purposefully in RAW were those from my January 2009 trip to Costa Rica. These were post-processed entirely using Canon’s Digital Photo Professional 3.2 software. Canon supplies the software and upgrades free of charge when you purchase one of their dSLRs; I’m not sure if this is true for their entry level dSLRs, but both a Windows and a MacIntosh version were available out-of-the-box with my purchase of the Canon EOS 20D about five years ago.
Let me say from the outset that I’m not a pro photographer. I’m not even a semi-pro. I’m probably more of a gadget whore wannabe than anything else. I tend to realize this only after I’ve invested lots of time and money in sophisticated technology that then feels entirely misplaced in my hands because I rarely exercise even 1% of its full potential. This probably explains both my intial decision to cheap out on purpose-built RAW processing software and my subsequent desire to prove Lightroom-using friends with similar photographic proficiency wrong about their own choice of software.
Back to the present: In my first attempt to do something neat with my recently acquired off-camera flash kit, I obtained fairly dismal results. This is one of the better shots:
I know, not particularly impressive. The strobe was set to 1/4, but even when I went lower, I still got that distracting glow you see on the right and an ugly shadow off of the lower portion of the mask. I suspect that this was due to the positioning of my shoot-through umbrella and the lack of a reflector to deal with the shadow, but this didn’t hit me until after I saw the images on my computer’s display. Hey, you learn by trying.
Since I was already on my computer by the time I realized what was going on, I wanted to see if the shot could be salvaged by post-processing and thought this would be a great time to compare DPP and LR. I had experience with the former and simply upgraded from 3.2 to the latest 3.4 release that Canon had posted on their website. I also downloaded a trial version of LR 2.2, which had been released recently along with Canon-specific camera profiles and a bunch of functionality that came out in the 2.0 release that I thought would make for a nice comparison of the two products. I should also mention that I recently purchased a copy of “The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers” by Scott Kelby, more as a way to see if I could do in DPP what my friends were claiming to be unique to LR than because I actually wanted to know the ins and outs of Lightroom.
As you can see, I was proved wrong:
The overpriced, $300 software performed much better than the free stuff. IMO, this was in large part due to the much more granular controls that LR provides over DPP. In the case of this particular shot, the “Recovery” slider totally saved the day w.r.t. the strobe-through-umbrella glow, while the “Vibrance” slider helped to bring out the rich colors without oversaturating the image the way the “Saturation” slider would have done. With a bit more digging, I could probably have found a way to deal with the shadow, too.
So why do I think that $300 is overpriced? Because I see the value of Lightroom to be locked up largely in the Develop module. The Library module is a “nice to have” option but more sophisticated than what I need, given my relatively low output compared to that of a professional photographer. And the Slideshow, Print and Web modules? The first two are a total waste in my case, and I use Gallery2, so I don’t have any use for the Web module. I would much prefer to pay $60 or $80 (or possibly $100) for the Develop module and have the others available for optional purchase. $300, however, seems a bit much for what I do. I just wish I’d done this comparison a few months earlier, when I was still a student; I could have purchased an academic license for one third of the cost of a full-priced license.
You live, you learn. The gallery that includes the full size JPEGs can be found here.
