Canon Digital Photo Professional (Dpp) Workflow Advice

I had some questions from a coin photographer who recently purchased a system from me that included a Canon Rebel XS. He was not clear how to do the various workflow items in DPP. I wrote out my recommendations in an email, but thought perhaps it would be useful for others on the forum as well. Here's what I wrote:

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DPP has a non-destructive workflow. In other words, you don't make changes to the original image. Any changes you make must be saved as a new image. This keeps you from accidentally over-writing the original.

My recommended workflow is:

- Select the image you want to edit in the Main Window and press the "Edit Image Window" button on upper left.
- Adjust the levels, saturation, and sharpness to your liking
- Press the "Trimming Angle" button to take you to the cropping tool
- Select the type of crop you want to do from the "aspect ratio" pulldown. I generally stick with "free" or "circle"
- Select the area you want to crop with the mouse. You can fine-tune the selection with the X, Y, Width, and Height boxes
- Once you get the size and position you want, Hit OK

At this point, the original image has not been changed. You need to hit the "Batch Process" button to save the changes you've made to a new file. In this window you can select where to save the file, the output format (usually jpg), how you want to name it, and if you want to re-size it.

I recommend downsizing by integers. The original image size from your camera is 3888x2592. Your downsizing should be by 2, 3, 4, or 6. The final sizes will be:

1944x1296 (/2)
1296x864 (/3) (this is what I recommend for most web publishing)
972x648 (/4) (good for ebay)
648x432 (/6) (too small for most purposes but sometimes usable)

If you do a square crop initially, I recommend cropping to 2592x2592. Then when you downsize, you can select 1296x1296, 864x864, etc. I recommend cropping first, then saving at 864x864 for most all your purposes.

If you want to circle crop, you must do it as a second step. First do the square crop, and save the file without any resizing. Then do a circle crop, and save at the final size.