Usually it is pretty difficult to improve on a camera company's own conversion process, but also most camera brand software lacks many adjustment advantages and efficiencies you will find in Adobe Camera Raw, LightRoom or Apple Aperture.

When I began testing Adobe Photoshop CS3 beta I found that just doing the conversion (without any adjustments) resulted in a much cleaner and higher fidelity to subject file than previous 3.X versions of Adobe Camera Raw. So Adobe obviously refined their conversion process when they developed Camera Raw 4.0 which was first included in the beta of Photoshop CS3. And I find it is now much closer in performance to the conversion obtained using a camera brand software utility.

I only shoot in RAW using my Nikon D200 after I learned to convert my RAWs to JPEGs for others through Bridge/Photoshop CS3. The JPEGs were so much sharper and had more color range giving it more punch. I do not know if the Canon software can easily convert RAWs to JPEGs, but I no longer shoot in RAW/JPEG combo just to send copies of un-retouched photos.

The conversion in Bridge CS3 is simple. Just open the file of RAWs and select all. Then go up under tools and choose Photoshop process and follow the directions. This will convert every file to a JPEG into a new folder and will leave your RAWs intact if you want to make and major changes. Best of all the JPEGs are better than the Nikon camera or the software.

I recently installed Photoshop cs3 and ever since I did my Cannon eos utility program will not open. I keep getting a error message saying my computer is not communicating with the camera. I am running windows vista, I attached my camera to my desktop running windows xp that has photoshop 7 on it and the eos program opened right up. I called canon and they said it may have something to do with cs being my default photo program. I checked my defaults and they are set to my cannon eos program. Any advice would really help!

I would be most concerned about using Vista at all if you're seriously and primarily concerned about using your computer for digital photographry. Over a year ago when I reviewed Vista (you can find my review on this web site) after it was released I found a serious Color Management bug that has never been corrected as far as I know, so as then in my review, I advised any digital photographer to not even consider moving to Vista. In fact anyone like yourself who reports a problem with Vista, considering the bug I found out about and many more problems reported since, your best move might be to uninstall Vista and replace it with Windows XP Pro SP3.

I run both CS3 and Canon DPP/ EOS software with no conflict, on both a Mac and Windows XP pro.

Thanks for the help! I am going to install my EOS software on my Mac at work today and plug in my camera to prove all these Vista lovers wrong! I have Vista, its caused my nothing but problems since I have been using it! Its seems to conflict with a lot of programs. I will update later today with my results.