Editing Software for G11

I just bought the G11. It's great. But I want to get the most out of it. I want to be shooting in RAW and get introduced to HDR images and such.

This will be my first time shooting in RAW.

Is the Digital Photo Professional 3.8.1 software that canon offers sufficient? Or would I be better off buying Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro or something similar?

I want something good, but also user friendly.

Thanks for the advice.

Andy

Canon's DPP is a basic editing tool with a few nice features. It has great colors, noise reduction, and resolution/detail, but it can be limiting in what you can do with it.

Photoshop Elements has a RAW converter as well and that may be a good place to start as photoshop is a very useful tool, especially if you don't want to fork out a ton of dough for the CS5.

A good compromise may be Lightroom. The LR 3Beta 2 is free for now so you may want to try it out. IMO, it's image quality is as good as the DPP (LR 3 version and not the LR 2) and it has a lot more features.

Don't forget GIMP - which is at least free. Haven't used it but know several who swear by it. Personally, LR does 80% of what I need

Tee Why--great response! Glad I looked. And catspaw thanks for the suggestion too.
DaveL
Toronto

I use Corel Paintshop Photo Pro X3 which has the functionality somewhere between Adobe Elements and Adobe Photoshop CS for a fraction of the cost. Highly recommended.

I downloaded the one month free trial of Paintshop Photo Pro X3 yesterday. It seems really good; loads of features. And pretty user friendly. I'm sure I'll end up buying it. Although I spent 6 hours on my computer last night playing around with it...I think I'll be shooting RAW+Jpeg and hope to get as much right in the camera as I can.

Thanks for the help.

I'm a regular abuser of Photoshop Elements. It works better at photo editing than I do. Buy the books that will assist you with the software.

I'm getting really good results with DXO Optics v.6 and the G11 module.

Hope you don't mind if I piggyback on your question, but it's similar so I didn't want to start a different thread. I purchased the G11 several months ago, and everytime I tried to edit RAW photos in DPP, I would get a message that DPP wasn't supported. (I've been shooting in RAW+JPEG so I could still save my RAW files on a disk). I called Canon, and they told me that DPP couldn't be used with Windows 7, and that I would just have to let Zoombrowser or whatever program just convert them to JPEG to edit. I just recently downloaded an update to Zoombrowser that said would make it compatible with Windows 7 but I'm still getting the same error message. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Have you check your display settings? DPP will not open if the resolution of your screen is set too low.