Should You Choose Canon Digital Photo Professional 4? Here is the Ultimate Guide

Last Updated on June 9, 2023 by Peter Wood


Canon’s Digital Photo Professional (DPP) is a free and powerful photo organizer and editor. It ships in the box with every EOS camera. When you need to view and edit the RAW file format of your EOS 7D Mark II, Canon Digital Photo Professional is the initial choice. What are the best features of the latest 4.17 version? Is there an alternative to edit Canon CR3, HEIF, or JPEG file formats? Just learn more about the program and its best alternative from the article.

Canon Digital Photo Professional

Part 1. All New Features of Canon Digital Photo Professional

Canon upgrades the Digital Photo Professional to the latest 4.17. It is designed and developed from the ground up and tailored to the workflows of professional and high-end amateurs. It helps them recognize the EOS System concepts of speed, ease of use, and high image quality. It comes with better and more approachable user interfaces. It can organize your files more easily.

Different from the previous version, Cannon Digital Photo Professional has included neural network image processing tools to optimize lenses, reduce noises, and de-mosaic for improving image quality. Moreover, there are some advanced features to control your EOS and transfer your photos and videos directly.

Neural Network Image Processing

The neural network image processing or AI feature is available on a subscription basis. It will intelligently analyze the image and applies enhancements based on neural network demosaic, lens optimization, noise reduction, and more algorithms. Just take the false color as an example, once you have installed the complementary EOS Utility, you can either select a point to set the white balance in the Image Preview or use the AI to fix the false color issue.

Fix Flase Color

Functional Color Adjustment Palette

Canon Digital Photo Professional 4.0 has a new color adjustment palette to allow hue, saturation, and luminance adjustment for eight individual color gamuts. You can adjust one specific color in isolation without affecting the pictures as a whole. For instance, when you tone background tones in a portrait with the new color adjustment palette, you do not need to worry that there might have been a risk of giving a colorcast to skin tones.

Color Adjustment Palette

Enhanced Interesting Highlight Function

Given increasing the freedom in tonal rendering, Canon has re-engineered the algorithms of Digital Photo Professional 4.0. By enhancing the fun highlights, DPP is now possible to reproduce tones. For example, it enables you to adjust tones in clouds and peoples’ faces where would previously have appeared washed out. Furthermore, it improves the shadow recovery function.

Support Dual Display

If you have dual monitors, you can use a secondary monitor offered by Digital Photo Professional as a preview window on the main display. As the primary monitor uses for delicate adjustments, a secondary image window for pictures can use as a magnifier for closer inspection of part of a picture.

Support Dual Display

Processing Your Images in a Fun Way

With Canon Digital Photo Professional 4.5’s digital darkroom tools, your pictures can be more professional and fun. For example, when you edit a RAW file, you can freely try different camera Pictures Styles. You can edit your photos with the old style, which is super cool. Or you can go to Multi -Layout view-to-view more than two pictures at once. There are various ways to access the image tools. And you can select one suits the images best.

Support Dual Pixel Raw Optimizer

Canon Digital Photo Professional 4.5’s Dual Pixel RAW Optimizer should be the new feature for photographers using EOS 5D Mark IV. When you take pictures in Dual Pixel RAW mode, a single RAW file saves two images into the file. Therefore, one photo consists of two kinds of image data while the other only keeps its image data. It means the Dual Pixel RAW files contain both the original image and parallax information, which can measure and subject distance information extrapolated. In short, you can make micro-adjustments of the position of maximum sharpness according to the Dual Pixel data recorded with the Dual Pixel RAW image.

Support Dual Pixel Raw Optimizer

Optimize Your RAW Photos

Digital Photo Professional helps you to optimize those photos and make them look their best. And you can always get the best results through DPP. DPP provides you three solutions to processing RAW files:

1. Fix images, like cropping and straightening, can be performed from the Tools menu in DPP.

2. Hide artifacts such as sensor spots through DPP’s Stamp tool. It can clone adjacent patches of pixels over them. Otherwise, you can use Apply Dust Delete Data. Make sure you have set that function up in your camera.

3. Change the camera’s White Balance or Picture Style settings in RAW editor mode. It empowers you to view the results in real-time on the screen. Or you can use DPP’s Click white balance eyedropper to sample an area where should be a natural white in case you cannot find a suitable White Balance present.

DDP

Apart from several new stunning features, Canon Digital Photo Professional has other functions that work closely with your Canon EOS camera and lenses. You can deal with more challenging problems such as chromatic aberration, lens-related artifacts or distortion, and vignetting by using this advanced imaging processing software.

Generally, both Canon Digital Photo Professional 4.0 and 4.5 optimize to deliver the best experience to DPP users. After knowing those new practical functions, you can try DPP 4.0 or 4.5 to beautify your photos. While if you are a newcomer to Canon Digital Photo Professional, you can have a comprehensive knowledge of the capabilities of this powerful DPP software.

Part 2. Get Fully Realize Canon Digital Photo Professional’s Function

Explore More AI Features for Canon Photos

Should you subscribe to DDP to get advanced neural network image processing tools? If you need to find more advanced AI algorithms, WidsMob AI Retoucher is the best alternative you should consider. It has AI features to reduce image noise, recover low light, remove haze, touch-up portraits, hide faces with mosaic, style transfer, convert photos to cartoons, and more. It has a whole series of HSL parameters, color adjustments, photo denoise settings, black-and-white analog films, and more. Of course, you can also find the basic editing features to touch-up photos, such as rotating, resizing, mirroring, flipping, etc.

Lowlight Recovery AI Retoucher Win Download Mac Download

HDR Image Processing for Canon Photos

Canon Digital Photo Professional offers High Dynamic Range (HDR) images for all EOS cameras. DPP’s HDR contains five turnings of brightness, color, and details. It has control over the final image, you can choose from different presets like Art Vivid, Art Standard, Art Bold, and Art Embossed. When you need to apply HDR filters for single photos or find more effects, WidsMob HDR provides 2 different modes, Bracketing Mode and Single Photo Mode. Of course, you can also tweak brightness, saturation, blur, opacity, sharpness, luminance, and contrast to alter the detailed enhancement.

Advanced Settings HDR Bracketed Win Download Mac Download

Exporting and Output with Multiple Formats

If you have a large amount of CR2, CR3, CRW, and JPEG, WidsMob ImageConvert is the desired Canon photo converter that works with most RAW file formats, JPEG, TIFF, AVIF, WebP, GIF, and others. It has multiple editing features to resize photos, add text/image watermarks, add frames, rotate/flip images, and convert photos to other formats in batches. You can also customize presets to apply a series of actions, and you can choose the desired one to export the photos with one click automatically. Moreover, there is another excellent AI image upscaler feature compared to Canon Digital Photo Professional.

Choose Upscale Mode ImageConvert Win Download Mac Download

Conclusion

Canon Digital Photo Professional is licensed as freeware for Windows operating systems. But when you updated to the DPP 4.17, you should find the neural network image processing tools to enhance photos. When you need to edit photos with more AI features, stitch photos to panoramas, apply HDR images, and even convert RAW files to portable photo printer-compatible file formats, here are more Canon Digital Photo Professional alternatives you can choose.