A couple of months ago I somewhat flippantly said to my colleagues at EOS magazine that I planned to do a quick update on the DPP book before I move on to do some of the other titles, thinking it wasn't going to take me very long.

After all, my previous edition covered DPP v4.10 – going to 4.12 is only a minor update.

Since that time, and with an author's writing 'haven' of lockdown, I've taken the book into a new format, and most notably added in an extended reference section at the start. I've started doing this to a number of my books because there can be gaps in knowledge if you haven't 'grown up' with digital photography. If this includes you, then you may have missed out on important background information that was shared in those days (and sadly, not always shared by today's photographers). The reference section seeks to fill this gap.

And so, here we are almost three months later, with over 150 pages added and I'm concluding that it was more than a quick update!

Lessons learned through the digital evolution

The first mainstream digital EOS model arrived in 2003, when the EOS D30 model appeared. That was the first digital model I owned myself, although my digital imaging pre-dates the D30 by several years – I worked at Canon when the EOS DCS1 and EOS DCS3 models were launched in 1995. (This means in two months’ time I will have been involved with Canon’s digital cameras for a quarter of a century… nothing like a milestone like that to make you feel old!)

I have also been using Photoshop pretty much since it came out. I started on Photoshop version 1 in 1991; this year (2020) Photoshop celebrates its 30th birthday. Just don’t ask a lady her age…

So, it's fair to say that over the years I've learned a great deal. I've been there, done that and got the t-shirt... especially for getting it wrong in many areas. I remember working on a product brochure for the EOS DCS3 and trying to work out why images were not coming out as expected when printed. It turned out you needed to colour balance your monitor… but back then nobody was working with digital images and Spyders for monitor balancing did not exist.

For those who have started with digital photography at some point in the past decade, catching up on 15+ years of development and evolution is a large learning curve when you first start.

One of my frustrations when I look at manuals and other books is that far too often authors assume that people have that basic knowledge and so expect that a novice can do things like navigate editing programs and understand what the symbols mean.

It’s a bit like putting a learner driver in a high spec Ferrari and assuming they know the basics like what the brakes are for and what the gears do.

Something that I’ve learnt over the last couple of years with the small group practical events with EOS Training Academy is that when you really get the chance to talk to people, many of the problems they have stem from the basics which got missed. Whether that's on post-production or shooting, if the basics aren't there, then quite often the more advanced techniques are simply not going to work.

The evolution continues...

Even though digital photography has been going a quarter of a century, it's still evolving. Photography never stops evolving, so the way that we did something 25 years ago isn't necessarily the way that we're going to work today or even the best way to still work.

My thirst to learn and explore new technology never wanes. It feels like a very exciting time to be involved in the photographic industry. We're on the cusp of an entirely new way of shooting, with the rapid breakthrough of mirrorless systems. They are quite different to use, compared to conventional DSLR models, and they're opening up new ways of photography and changing the potential of the images we can capture.

One thing that has really caught my attention when updating the book is High Dynamic Range Perceptual Quantizer (HDR PQ, for short). This new technology allows us to capture the range of tones and contrast that can be seen with the human eye.

Whilst HDR may be a familiar term – where you take three (or more) images and then combine them (achievable automatically in-camera or during post-production) – HDR PQ is not about shooting multiple images. Instead it enables you to produce that same wider tonal range previously achieved using several images, but in a single image shot in-camera. This means that a far greater range of subjects can be captured using this technique – it wasn't previously possible with moving subjects, for example.

Now, the first camera to feature HDR PQ is the EOS-1D X Mark III, Canon’s flagship camera. Whilst that is of very narrow appeal, what is intriguing is that using my EOS 5D Mark IV (October 2016) and EOS R (October 2018), I can shoot RAW images and then produce exactly the same results using the HDR PQ tool in Digital Photo Professional. And I REALLY like the results.

If you're wondering what HDR PQ does and what benefit it is, I have a few sample images showing with and without it below.