DPP "general" recipe?

When you process a batch of photos with DPP do you first apply a general recipe to all and then tweak as needed, or do you just adjust each image one at a time?

I try to group similar images, tweak one, copy recipe, then paste recipe to rest of similar images' repeat on other groups of images until I have finished. Then process at end.

After using DPP for more than three years I discovered something new just a few days ago. If you copy a recipe to the clipboard from an image, all the parameters will be copied and applied to selected files. However, if you select a group of images on the thumbnail page and then open the tool palette, only the parameter(s) you change on the palette will be changed in the selected images. The other parameters will be unaffected. This is faster than copy-pasting a global recipe and can, of course, be followed with individual tweaks.

I shoot raw with neutral picture style and all parameters set at default.

In DPP, typically I'll set all the pictures to standard picture style and bump sharpness to 3. That's my baseline for further adjustments.

If there are several pictures (perhaps all of them) shot under the same lighting then I will adjust WB en bloc. Other adjustments are normally made per picture.

None of this is hard and fast. It really depends on the shooting conditions, subject matter and how well I set up the camera in the first place.

For example, on a recent 3 week trip to New Zealand I came back with over 2,000 photos. Other than PS=standard and sharpness=3 there was no way to use the same settings across all the photos. They were shot indoors/outdoors, on sunny days, cloudy days, very early morning, midday etc.. So lighting conditions were all over the place.

Conversely, recently I shot over 200 frames of people jumping off a ski ramp, over a period of about 30-40 minutes. Lighting didn't vary at all and my camera was set to manual exposure. In this case, any recipe good for one photo would almost certainly be good for the whole bunch - WB, contrast, saturation, brightness, NR etc..

It's horses for coarses.

By the way, I find judging sharpness very unreliable when using the "fit to window" option, as it's tough for the algorithms that resize the photo to perfectly shrink the image to an arbitrary size - whatever the size of your monitor will allow. It's much better to judge sharpness at 50% or 100%. The same thing is true when batch processing to jpeg. I think the results are a fraction sharper if you output to, say 50% or 25% of the dimensions. This isn't just with DPP, I find it with Lightroom as well.

For example, my 40D takes pictures with dimensions of 3888*xxxx. Assuming I don't crop it, and thus change the dimensions, I will output a jpeg at 3888/4 = 972*xxx or 3888/5 = 778*xxx and this seems to yield a sharper photo than outputting at, say, 1024*xxx or 800*xxx.

Nice info tdodd.....
I've been curious about an answer to the OP question as well. I'm finding out more and more that I love taking the pictures but beginning to hate PP. I'm trying hard to live with raw but it's getting frustrating. It's tips like yours and others I get here that's beginning to help.

iwannabe wrote in post #4875649
I love taking the pictures but beginning to hate PP. I'm trying hard to live with raw but it's getting frustrating.

In my opinion, the wonderful thing about raw is you can change your mind after you've taken the picture and you don't lose any quality as a result. There is no requirement to sit down and painstakingly craft each photo individually. If you shot the photos well and had the camera settings as you like then simply highlight all the photos and press "Batch Process". Then go and have a beer or a cup of tea. Shooting raw doesn't force you to post process; it simply gives you the option to do so without penalty.

The other great thing about raw is the extra latitude to fix exposure errors, like recovering blown highlights (not with DPP, sadly) or tweak the WB or crop the photo with no loss of quality whatsoever.

When you shoot in jpeg you are locking in post processing choices (WB, contrast, saturation, sharpening and tone are all set when the jpeg is created) within the camera and then throwing away data as your 12-14 bit colours captured by the sensor are converted to 8 bits and then compressed for the jpeg format, thus losing further data. Every edit/save you perform on the same file after that continues to rob the file of detail and quality. Some editors (like Lightroom) allow you to edit as much and as often as you like and never change the original file, so anything you create is only one generation removed from the original. Other editors, unless you make careful "save as" choices, may overwrite your original each time you save your edits. Over time the quality of that jpeg file will degrade if you make repeat edits and saves to it.

I understand all the benefits of raw and am convinced it's the way to go, it's just that when I see a picture I'm always wondering if I can make it better. What looks good to me may not look good to others is what I think. It's hard for me just to "let it go".

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I'm going to try to change my way of thinking and be more confident in my abilities....i'd much rather sit and have a beer that spend all my time post processing! Thanks for your input.

Thanks for the answers. I'm still tweaking my "baseline" recipe but I think I've about got it. Right now it's Standard PS, Contrast 0, Color Tone 0, Saturation 1, Sharpness 3. I had the sharpness lower but raised it after reading tdodd's post. I think I like it better now. I haven't touched the RGB tab yet though. I figured I'd save that for the GIMP if needed.

I don't understand the science behind all this but the antialiasing filter, on the front of the sensor, will naturally soften the image captured in the raw file. If you were shooting in jpeg with "standard" settings (whatever they are) the camera would apply sharpening to the image before you ever got to see it.

When you begin to process a raw file, unless your parameters are tweaked already, you will see a completely unsharpened image. It is expected that you should have to apply sharpening later on in your workflow. It is not a sign of a poor lens or poor photographic technique to have to notch up the sharpening a bit. A setting of 3 out of 10 in DPP is more than acceptable. If you have to go beyond 5 out of 10 then I'd say either you're going for a special look or are battling against soft focus in the image.

I had sharpness at 1 with the plan of using USM later. A lot of these photos won't get any further processing though so might as well sharpen them more in DPP. I may lower the ones I plan on processing further. I've read that it's better to sharpen later with USM but I don't know how true that is. More testing to do

Common wisdom is that sharpening is the last thing you do in your workflow, but it is also accepted that a little bit of sharpening of the raw file is normal before you go to town with all the creative stuff. If you're staying within DPP then the sequence of edits makes no difference. But it's a different story when you're adding adjustment layers in PS.