Canon software
Canon has a number of software programs that are freely available to any Canon user. The two main programs that I use are EOS Utility and DPP, or Digital Photo Professional. EOS Utility 2.5.1 is Canon's current method for establishing a connection between a Canon camera that shoots tethered and a computer, whether Mac or Windows-based. As of this writing, the current version of DPP is 3.5.2.
You can set EOS Utility and DPP to communicate with each other. Thus, if both programs are open and set to communicate, as you take each capture, the image appears first in EOS Utility and then in the DPP window. To set up this communication, follow these steps:
1. Open EOS Utility. This is the initial capture program.
2. In the EOS Utility main window, click the Preferences button located at the bottom-right corner. The EOS Utility Preferences window appears.
3. Click the drop-down menu where Basic Settings appears. This is located at the top of Preferences window shown in figure 4.3.
EOS Utility - EOS-IDs Mark III
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4.2 The EOS Utility main window
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4.3 The EOS Utility Preferences window
4. Scroll down the menu choices to Linked Software and click to select it. The options change.
5. Choose Digital Photo Professional as the software to link.
6. Select a Destination folder from the same menu you used earlier (located in the upper left corner).
The options change.
7. Choose the folder you want to save images to, or create a new one, and then click OK.
8. Go back to the main EOS Utility window (figure 4.2), and click the Camera Settings, Remote Shooting option. You see the window change to a Camera Control window. From here, you can control f-stop, exposure mode, color temperature, file type, exposure compensation, and ISO — all the basic settings normally controlled by the camera. You can also activate Remote Live View shooting from here, as well as initiate an Intervolometer program for timed sequences. All in all, very cool!
- 4.4 The EOS Preferences Destination folder
Take a test image. The image first appears on your camera's rear LCD screen. Then it appears in an EOS Utility Quick Preview window. If DPP is not open yet, it opens itself, and the capture then appears in DPP. In DPP, you can control whether the Light Table view is active. This is where the image appears as a thumbnail as it arrives or is in the enlarged view where the image displays as big as you set the DPP window. A histogram is viewable on the side. Double-clicking the image or pressing the 100 button on top of the image instantly takes you to 100 percent view to check focus.
If you don't want the Quick Preview window to appear, click the Quick Preview button located at the bottom of the Camera Control window, second from the left.
This tethering system works very well, both on Windows as well as Macs that have System 10.5.6 or later installed. However, if you're a Mac user working with Mac OS 10.5, you'll notice one challenge early on. As mentioned previously, Canon chose to use USB 2.0 over FireWire as the way to connect the EOS-1Ds Mark III to a computer. This might be the right move in the long run, but at the moment, Apple USB drivers are relatively slow. Thus, if you capture with a Windows machine or Mac's latest OS, a RAW file appears in two seconds or so, while even on a fast Mac, the timing for RAW capture and display is closer to five seconds on System 10.5. However, I have two nifty workarounds for this (which are explained in the following sections) that allow rapid capture and display using Macs, at least Macs with Leopard installed. This also greatly increases buffer rate — how many images the camera can capture in one sequence while shooting in RAW and tethered modes.
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