7. What Are The Pictures Like?

• EOS 5D Digital SLR...
• • shopkingcamera
  • $1589.95
• • shopkingcamera
  • $1589.95

The Canon 5D digital camera produces some of the finest images I have ever seen. Exposure and color are right on. I found myself messing less with raw images in Photoshop than with any other digital camera I've used in the past.

Speaking of Photoshop, at the time of this writing Adobe didn't yet have an official raw filter for the 5D. The filter is required to open a raw image directly in Photoshop. However, Camera Raw filter 3.2 works fine with 5D raw images even though it's not certified to do so. And that's a very, very good thing because it looks like there are problems with the software that comes with the 5D, Canon's Digital Photo Professional (DPP). It opens raw images just fine. However, the Transfer to Photoshop option on the program's Tools menu didn't work at least on the computer I used. After a good deal of waiting Photoshop opened but before the image opened, Photoshop closed without as much as an error dialog box. Additionally, sometimes after Photoshop closed and I closed Digital Photo Professional, I was unable to reopen DPP without logging out of Windows and back in again to clear whatever process(es) running on my computer caused all this grief. "Well," I can hear you saying, "why didn't you just save the DPP raw image as a TIFF file and open the TIFF in Photoshop?" Short answer: Because that process gums up my workflow and I hate it!

It's very difficult to show you the quality of images from any camera on the Internet. It's even more difficult with a camera of the resolution of the Canon 5D. I can't expect you to download 12.9 MB raw files which you can't open and our webmaster would literally kill me if I encouraged you to engage in such downloads. You could down the TIFF files. However, raw files converted to TIFF format are even bigger at 75 MB if I want to preserve all of the resolution. I don't know what our webmaster would do if I got you downloading files that big.

So I decided to show you two small jpeg images taken from totally unaltered raw files. You can download the full 7 MB 72 pixel per inch jpeg version of either image by clicking on it. If you do download a file, take it into Photoshop or another image editor fiddle with the color and other image qualities if you'd like and sharpen the image or reduce its size, raise its resolution to 200 or so pixels/inch and send it to your favorite printer. This will give you some sense of the image quality possible with the Canon 5D. Two caveats: (1) Don't put too much stock in this method of assessing the quality of a camera's images. You really need to look at the full 350 pixel/inch resolution roughly 8 x 12 inch images produced by the camera. (2) Don't download the images if you don't plan to use them. A bunch of 7 MB downloads could significantly reduce performance on the servers and network that support this website.