Canon "Digital Photo Professional"

It is photo editing software. If you don't have Photoshop or some other program that can edit Canon RAW files from your camera, you will need DPP. I set up my Zoombrowser to automatically open DPP when I take a shot to check the result. Sometimes I even use DPP to do some editing. It has a couple of unique features that are useful in some situations.

Think of it this way: SOMETHING has to process the raw data from the image sensor to create the picture in a format that can be displayed (usually this is JPEG - the format defined by the Joint Photographic Expert Group - http://www.jpeg.org/ - in 1992).

That takes computer power and so the more processing done inside the camera the more powerful the chip required. BUT, 99% of users never need more. So your camera and mine and everyone elses has a nice middle of the road chip with reasonable defaults that creates .jpg pictures for the 99%.

What if you want MORE? That's where the raw format comes in, it's manufacturer and camera specific, but gives access to the most detail. Some cameras have more sensitive image sensors but they are more subject to noise, so the simple answer is not to use all the sensitivity.

So, DPP is a computer program that does the same raw -> jpg processing, but /a/ takes advantage of the extra processing power of the computer to do it -maybe- more & better and /b/ gives access to a wide range of settings and extra information and manipulation for the expert user.

What kind of things? Well you can adjust the color curves in a lot of programs (maybe you shot at tungsten instead of daylight and so the image is bluish). But doing that in the already processed jpg does lose more information. And maybe to the point where a true expert can tell.

I really don't know, I haven't explored DPP myself. My thinking is that if the .jpg files meet your needs, you don't need to worry about the raw files (in fact to save space you could turn them off and not even save them). Although storage is cheap and it doesn't cost all THAT much to save them (the jpgs run around 8mb and the raw .cr2 files 25m from my T3i) and that way if someday you need them you still have them.

After some prompting in another thread, I now see DPP as far more useful than I did before. I found its cropping feature, which includes circle crops, which are not easy to get in all software packages.