Having caught up with my RAW editing, I thought it worth trying out the RGB pane of DPP on some .jpgs - 350D, Pana FZ7 and Nikon E4500.

This part works on .tif and .jpg as well as any RAW that have not come out 100% just using the RAW pane. There is a histogram window that combines Levels and Curves in one go and interacts with brightness and contrast sliders+numeric readout, very fine tuning. Then there are sliders+numeric for saturation and sharpness, the former also feeding back to the histogram window.

Result: better all round on all 3 cameras than previous best efforts using PSE4 (or in some cases equivalent mac progs) on the fairly random samples tried. And done in a couple of minutes rather than, what, 10-20 minutes for a medium tricky PS edit...now just need to go back over the few thousand other images.

NB once again the working window is good preview and only saves on command, but includes full facilities ie toggle to 50,100, 200% views and before over after. It tends to underplay changes, but as it remains there exactly as left throughout the folder being edited, quite quick to go back for a final tweak and resave.

For reduced forum images, both full size and reduced can be generated consecutively, but with the original left full size in case when image is printed or posted, a final tweak does prove necessary. Likewise when proceeding to another folder, the editing recipe can be saved just as on RAW and the high precision cloning tool is still available (and auto dust removal if needed)