I would appreciate any advice regards settings on the camera, I always shoot in RAW so I wonder if it actually matters, I think the settings refer to jpegs only, but I am not entirely sure:
I have the Picture Style currently on Standard, Sharpness on minimal (none) and the Contrast Saturation and Color Tone set to mid point.
I am getting used to DPP for conversion and by and large I think it is quite reasonable and there I can always change the colour temp and appearance anyway. Another question is it better to try to get the initial RAW image in as near the setting I want and therefore use DPP and subsequently Photoshop minimally - or again does it not really matter.
In DPP I usually reset to Daylight or Cloudy or use the white balance depending upon the day followed by the Faithful setting - again any comments would be appreciated.
DPP does read and use your camera settings in the file when you open it. However, it allows you to change them.(like you changing to Faithful). It does the same with the NR settings. If you have NR disabled or set to low, medium or high, DPP reads that and sets it. It usually takes a little bit for the setting to show up in the preview, but it isn't set in stone until you save as a tif or jpg.
Neat Image v6 works very well with the 50D without softening details. I process RAW files with no noise reduction and reduce noise with Neat Image v6. The 50D has some impressive details.
I currently don't have a third party NR program. I have High ISO set to standard and then check in dpp by switching it to 0 or comparing to the same image in Lightroom. Lightroom shows major noise at anything above 200ISO for me, so I know I will see if I lose details by comparing the DPP and Lightroom of the same image.
Thanks Dug & Paul, I use Neat Image once I have converted from DPP to Photoshop - I think this is what you are indicating Paul (?) i.e. you don't apply Neat Image to the Raw images in DPP. I can only use Neat Image however on images less then 1024 pixels currently, as I have the freebie version.
I suppose my only issue now is to to decide whether to buy the Home or the Home plus edition.