Digital Photo Professional Recipe location?

[raztazor]

I have been using Digital Photo Professional 1.5 (DPP) for about a week now and have created many recipes for my .CR2 Canon 20D pictures.

I was wondering, where are these recipes actually stored? They are not stored in the raw file or another file with the same filename so they must be stored in a database somewhere. The question is where? Does anyone know?

The reason why I ask this is imagine that one has edited thousands of photos using DPP and then you transfer to a new computer, re-install the software copy the raw files across. If the recipes are not copied then the user (me in this case) would have to start all over again.

[slejhamer]

Raz, when you save the recipes, you either save them to the clipboard and then use them during the session to apply to other files, or you save them to a particular location as a .vrd file (you'll get a dialog box asking where you want to save them.)

If you have only done the clipboard method, I'm not sure how you would recover them. Obviously if you saved the .vrd files to a folder then they should be readily accessible. I would suggest making subdirectories to your image folders for these, or at least saving them in the same folder as the RAW files, for easy access.

I could be wrong, as I've only used DPP for a short while, but that's my understanding of how the recipes are stored. Hope that helps.

[raztazor]

Thanks for the reply.

I have discovered that DPP actually saves 'changes or recipes' into the original raw file which is great.

I really like the fact I can make minor changes which are saved and so I can always 'recreate' a master TIFF from the raw without having to tweak the photo again.

[slejhamer]

WOW - you are correct, and I'm not sure I like that!

I just made changes to a RAW file in DPP, "added the recipe and saved." Opened up Windows Explorer to look at the file, and sure enough the actual .CRW file shows today's date as the date modified. So you are actually changing the RAW file when you do this.

That could be dangerous!

[raztazor]

Don't panic it's not as bad as it seems. The original photo data in the raw file is not modified at all. The additional 'changes/recipe' are added into the file. This extra data is not recognisable by other other software (except DPP).

I noticed that Adobe Photoshop CS and Breezebrowser Pro 1.0.1 just ignore the modifed raw file and only process the original shooting data. So what this means is the shooting data is always preserved and the tweaks are stored as extra data which only DPP knows about. I did wonder how DPP managed to re-create the thumbnails and DPP appears to use the original data + any recipe (eg: brigtness adjustment) to draw the thumbnail.

This makes it possible to create repeat conversions into tiffs or jpegs from the modified raw creating the exact same proof that was created after the original tweak.

[slejhamer]

Great sleuthing, Raz. Thanks for the info! Good to know that the actual shooting data remains untouched.

Cheers,