Adding Pop to Motorsport Photos using DPP

[Kevbuts]

Dear All, I am new to the forums and this is my first post. I have been taking photos of motorsport for many years, and have been using a DSLR for around the last two years. Having recently upgraded to a Canon 40D, I have decided to give shooting in RAW a go after having discussed the benefits of this with several professional motosport photographers.

What I would like some advice on is how to adjust my images to make them pop using DPP (the RAW editing & conversion software which came with the camera)? I have played around with adjusting brightness, sharpness and saturation, white balance etc. but I can't seem to be able to get the settings just right so that the colours are realistic, but the subject stands out (pops). What I tend to find is that to get the colours of the cars correct, the grass becomes over saturated and looks unrealistic.

I have noticed that in DPP there are tabs for RAW, RGB and another for adjusting noise reduction settings. There are sliders for adjusting brightness, sharpness, saturation etc. in both the RAW and RGB tabs. Do these do the same thing, or should I be solely using the RAW adjustments for my RAW files, and the RGB adjustments for adjusting JPG files?

Any advice you can provide with be most appreciated.

[tzalman]

Canon itself, in its DPP manual, advises doing the bulk of the editing of a RAW on the RAW tab. However, there is no reason why you can't do edits on the RGB tab also, especially since the Levels/Curve editor is there, and it would be better then doing global editing in a second application if that application is limited to 8 bits (or you choose to go down to 8 bits coming out of DPP). As to the difference between the two tabs, my guess (in common with many other software providers, Canon does not publish it internal workflow) is that edits on the RAW tab are done in linear space and those on the RGB tab are done in gamma corrected space. At any rate all edits are done in 16 bit, the reduction to 8 bit (if selected) being done as the final step before writing the output file.