# Lightroom 4.3 with Canon 6D RAW - Issues Compared to DPP



## bdg (Feb 11, 2013)

I have been shooting with a Canon T2i since they rolled out and started RAW shooting shortly afterwards. I purchased LR3 (at the time) during one of the Adobe one-day sale and have been sold ever since. That is, until I just purchased a Canon 6D as what I would see as a great upgrade.

Almost every reviews of the 6D is stellar and I was ready for better low light shooting, etc. that the full frame would provide. I have been running LR4.3 since it was released in mid-December. Although there is a difference in LR between the T2i and 6D, the differences are not significant at all. I am shooting the same f-stop, same ISO, same shutter speed and look 1:1 in LR. I've tried the T2i with my 18-135 EF-S and with the new 24-105L with similar results.

I decided to try DPP for the RAW and was greatly impressed with the results as compared to LR. Huge difference with my test shots. These shots are tough - night time on my back deck with a fresh snowfall and with floodlights on. Shooting as high as 10,000ISO with the 6D and 6400ISO with the T2i. I've also tried the same shot with a 580EXII on each and results are again not significantly different in LR but quite different in DPP.

I tried RAW+JPG and the JPG is almost identical to the shot in DPP. LR remains very grainy and I can reduce this with the Details slider but with the obvious loss of detail.

Just wondering if others have seen this? Opening each image in DPP, saving it and then importing to LR would be tedious and time consuming. I could shoot more in JPG but this is not my desire - at all.

Help!!


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Feb 11, 2013)

Its pretty tough to help unless you post a raw image or a link to one.
Post images from your T2i as well. High ISO images of 12800 and 25600 will be where the big difference is, so post those too.
Its very difficult for us to imagine what you might be seeing.
Its not particularly difficult or tedious to export images from DPP to lightroom, just one mouse click can export one or a thousand of them.
That batch process button you see in the top icon bar at the far right is what does it. You do need to do a one time setup in the panel that comes up when you click the button, and when you import the images, plan ahead and place them in a folder of their own. 
All the images in the folder you select will be processed and exported to lightroom as tiff files, and oppened in lightroom, just one click!


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## bdg (Feb 11, 2013)

Thanks for your thoughts.... maybe I should have posted this to the software forum?

I am attaching 4 images:
(1) 6D in DPP
(2) 6D in LR4.3
(3) T2i in DPP
(4) T2i in LR

While there is definitely a difference in the quality of the difference in IQ from the T2i to the 6D, this really punches through with the DPP converter as compared to the LR.


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## bdg (Feb 11, 2013)

Here is one more example....

Another image:
(1) LR4.3
(2) DPP
(3) JPG processed in the 6D

The JPG is much closer to the DPP image than that of LR.


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## cerevis (Feb 11, 2013)

Bdg, what you are seeing here is purely the difference in how DPP processes noise compared to LR4.3. In my experience DPP tends to lean towards total noise and texture removal whereas LR4.3 tends to focus on retaining texture structure while reducing luminance and chroma noise.

The key piece of info you have left out is: What are your LR4.3 sharpening and noise reduction sliders set to? The sharpening might be set to high detail and the noise reduction to less than 15. In this case you will definitely see much more noise in LR compared to DPP as DPP has so little control of how much noise reduction you can apply.

Follow these links for detailed explanation on LR sharpening and noise reduction http://www.ishootshows.com/2010/08/31/tutorial-sharpening-with-adobe-lightroom/ 
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-lightroom-3/remove-noise-from-photos/


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## SouthTune (Feb 11, 2013)

Hello,
When you open a Raw file in DPP, the program applies NR automatically. The amount of the noise reduction applied depends always on the ISO setting of the shot, that means the higher ISO the higher NR will be applied. The Noise Reduction in lightroom defaults always to 0, so you have to adjust the luminance slider accordingly. In addition you can also adjust the masking slider in sharpness section, so that you will remove useless sharpness (that generates noise) from the flat areas of you image . (try to play with this slider by pressing the Ctrl key, so that you will able to comprehend how this setting affect your image). ...I'm sorry for my english!


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## seekthedragon (Feb 11, 2013)

This is a common "problem" for people, who are new to either LR or RAW workflow.

Canon (and also Nikon) cameras are embedding the JPEG picture style to the RAW metadata, and when you import your shots in DPP, this picture style becomes automatically applied. The most visible effects of this used to be contrast adjustment and the noise reduction.
Thus, you get a picture, like the in-camera JPEG, made by DPP.

However, Lightroom used to keep almost every settings at 0, when importing, except if you use presets. So you really see the raw picture, and you have to develop it yourself like the in-camera JPEG, if you wish so.

Notice, that during import, the small pictures you see at first are like the DPP ones, and then they become the flat LR ones. This is due to the embedded small JPEGs in the RAW, which LR shows you first, until it creates its own previews. These embedded JPEGs also carry the in-camera picture style.

After all, the "issue" is just the way things work here.

(By the way, if you check that garbage collector like stuff on the right side of your pictures, you really see the detail loss due to the noise reduction applied by DPP, just to confirm what I said.)


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## bdg (Feb 11, 2013)

Thank you everyone for your quick feedback on this point. The LR sliders are all at their defaults and these screen grabs were immediately after the "import" in the history. I was thinking that DPP would also have been a "raw" image rendition without the extra softening / noise reduction, but it seems that this might have been an incorrect assumption.

I recognize that the lighting test here is a tough one, but the intention was really to evaluate the high-ISO performance of the T2i versus the 6D. I did not conduct the detail tab changes in LR and did not export these to a JPG for comparison, and will try that this evening for testing purposes.

Maybe I am wrong here - but I was really expecting the 6D to have much less noise than the T2i - but I really don't see this as the case in these examples. Ultimately, if I am starting with similar noise both from my T2i and from the 6D, I would expect similar end-result jpgs (again, I could be wrong with that assumption!).

Note that the T2i was maxed-out in the Auto-ISO setting at 6400 and hence the reason that the image is a little darker than the 12,800 (wow!) ISO of the 6D.

My thoughts are the increased NR with LR will reduce the crispness of the vertical lines on the right of the image, although these seem quite good in DPP.

Thanks again for your comments.


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