I discovered something today that I think is pretty cool. Probably a dozen members are going to answer, "Hello! We've been doing that for ages," but I'd like to share it anyway. But first a preface: I've been using DPP ever since I came over to Canon, almost two years ago, but I've never even opened the Stamp tool. I always figured that the cloning would be better in my regular editing program. Today for some unknown reason I decided to check it out and I discovered two very interesting things. First, any operations that you do on an image with the tool can be copied to the clip-board and then applied to any other selected images, one by one. Second, the list of operations can be saved in the metadata of the file the same way a recipe is saved. This means that with just a few minutes work you can get the DPP Stamp tool to do for any camera the same dust concealing operation that it does for the 400D/XTi. Here's how you do it: Take the sort of shot that you normally take to check for dust spots - aperture f22 and a shot of a clear sky, blank wall, sheet of paper, whatever. In DPP increase contrast to the maximum and pull in the levels in order to make the spots more visible. Open the Stamp tool and use the Repair Dark option to make the spots the same color as their immediate surroundings. Click OK and save the image with the editing and store it someplace on your HD. Now, whenever you want to remove the dust spots from a folder of photos, simply drag (or copy) that file into the folder and open it in DPP. Select the edited file and any others you want to treat and open Stamp. Bring up the edited file and you will see the spot removal that you did before applied again. Click on the Copy button and then using Next go through the selected files clicking Paste for each one and its spots will disappear. Be sure to click OK at the end. What you are doing is manually feeding into the metadata of each image the same information that the 400D automatically writes in the metadata, namely, a map of the dust. And this doesn't need RAWs, it can be done with jpgs and tifs also. You can even do it for a (dare I say it?) non-Canon camera.
I don't have Photoshop so I don't know if this (preparing a dust map and using it to quickly clean a series of images) can be done with PS. I'm sure someone will enlighten me. The only thing lacking from the DPP setup is the ability to apply the cleaning to a batch of images with one click the way that a recipe can be batch pasted. As far as I can see, images from the 400D have to be treated individually also. However the advantages of a batch paste are so obvious that as the mapping feature appears in future camera models maybe we will see it added.
