Ok, so after thinking my lens was bad, and proved to just be ignorant about DSLRs (and here I thought I knew a few things about photography <g>), I've moved into the realm of the RAW shooter.

Camera's a Canon Rebel XTi. I've loaded the software, and can figure out how to use it, but what I'm short of wondering is:

What should I do with it? Are there certain batch adjustments I'll be wanting to make with most photos?

Also, I'm trying to finagle the software into helping me do some things and I can't figure out how...

I prefer to use a card reader, rather than have to hook up the camera. However, the EOS Utility only starts when I hook the camera up, not when I put the card in (the Nikon Transfer utility recognizes when I put in Nikon-formatted cards). I can fire up the ZoomBrowser and manually go in through there, but that defeats the purpose. Is there any way to get the EOS Utility to recognize the CF card without the camera?

Thanks for any replies

jmc asks: ...I've moved into the realm of the RAW shooter... What should I do with it? Are there certain batch adjustments I'll be wanting to make with most photos?

That will depend on your own taste as to how you think the pictures should look vs. how the conversion software's defaults make them look. If the default white and black points, color saturation, etc., are consistently off what you would like them to be, then you might benefit from setting the offending defaults either up or down if the software lets you do this.

Now, I'm not familiar with how Canon's converter works, but if it opens the image using the camera's settings rather than opening an image adjusted from the camera settings by some kind of "optimizing" protocol of the software, it might be easier to adjust the camera settings to give you a better default image.

No comment about the card reader problem. :sad:

Grant