Andy,


I'm a bit late to the party but I had to wait until I was home to do this.


I didn't see the 2.3EV worth of headroom on this raw. I used three raw converters andnone neededan EV adjustment. I was very suprised to see how good the exposure was. I'm sure with the first two you could easily tweak things to get the color more like you want it but I thought the default renderings were pretty interesting. Here goes.


Warning: The followingimagesmay exceed the color gamut ofsome monitors. There are shades that I cannot view on my laptop lcd. On my HP LP2275w each of the following images looks great. Even your original posted image looks pretty clean!


SilkyPix Development Studio Ver 3.0.25.1 - Default Settings





Original SilkyPix Here


ACR 4.4 with ACR4.4 selected as the camera profile. Default Settings





Original ACR Here


Picasa from Google - Go figure, I like the way it rendered the 450D RAW!





Original Picasa Here


I don't like and don't use DPP for obvious reasons. I don't think that's necessarily the problem. It may have alot to do with the extreme color gamuts of the photo being displayed on a monitor that doesn't have the ability to display those gradients properly. I don't know what kind of printer you have but I'd try printing it and see what you get. You may be suprised.


Out of curiosity I am interested to know which rendering is the closest to what you were looking for. (If any were close)


Chuck