Elements 9, Canon DPP and RAW

[cecco]

Recently I purchased a Canon T2i, my first DSLR camera. I've been reading book after book and try to learn as much as possible because I'd really like to do photography as a hobby.

A couple of days ago I purchased Photoshop Elements 9 along with Scott Kelby guide in an effort to get more into the processing side of things. I've taken a few pictures in RAW to get started and experiment with it and follow alongside the guide. All was well until I got to zooming and realized the picture in PSE9 Camera Raw didn't look quite right. The shadows especially seemed to have uneven color gradients and looked grainy. I opened up the Canon DPP to confirm this and sure enough, in DPP the RAW files looked just fine, smooth even gradients with no artifacts.

My questions to other Canon users are:

Is this a PSE limitation or do I have a setting wrong somewhere? I noticed at the bottom of Camera RAW it defaults to 8-bit.

Is there a workaround to this and if there is could you share what is that you do to process your RAW images and get them ready for PSE?

PSE updated shortly after the initial install, so I assume I have the latest camera profiles.

 

[twistedlogic]

I opened up the Canon DPP to confirm this and sure enough, in DPP the RAW files looked just fine, smooth even gradients with no artifacts.

Not a Canon shooter, but if it works the same as Nikon's RAW I may have an answer.

What you are looking at in DPP is most likely the embedded JPEG included in the RAW file, or the one that shows up on the back of your LCD. All in-camera settings (NR, WB, Color space) are being applied to this preview jpeg.

Elements 9 just reads the RAW data and applies some generic starting points for how to display the image, as you cannot view RAW data until its been proccessed.

 

[cecco]

As I research this further I see some photographers will use DPP to make adjustments to the RAW file and then convert it to TIFF 16-bit or large JPEGs for export to PSE. Would this transfer the better picture quality I see in DPP to PSE? Trying to wrap my head around this stuff.