CANON
86 http://www.digitalcameraworld.com
SCHOOL
SOFTWARE
SOLUTIONS
Get to grips with Canon’s free Raw image organizing, editing
and sharing software – Digital Photo Professional 4
PETER TRAVERS
CANON EXPERT
Peter’s been a passionate
photographer for well over
20 years. He’s worked on
PhotoPlus since the very
first issue, back in 200 7,
and has been the magazine’s
editor for the past eight years.DOWNLOAD PROJECT FILES
TO YOUR COMPUTER FROM:
http://downloads.
photoplusmag.com/pp160.zip01 CHOOSE A SHAPE
Browse to crop_before.tif and choose
View>Edit image window. Click on the
Crop and Rotate Images panel. Set the
Aspect Ratio drop-down to 4:3. Click-
and-drag to crop the shot to lose the
hut on the left and the boat on the right.02 STRAIGHTEN HORIZON
Drag inside the overlay to create a
composition with more sky and less sea.
Adjust the Grid Pitch for a denser mesh
to help see if the horizon is straight or
tilted. Drag the Angle slider to straighten
the horizon using the grid as a reference.03 NON-DESTRUCTIVE
After cropping, click on any other tab in
the Tool palette. The overlay will vanish
and you’ll see the cropped version of the
shot. However, you can go back to the
Crop panel at any time to fine-tune the
crop and even restore missing pixels.STEP BY STEP CROP USING THE GRID
Modify the crop overlay window’s grid pitch (or density) to crop with precision
n pre-digital days,
when shooting on
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of photographs that we
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a shoot. This forced us to
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carefully to avoid wasting
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photography enables us to
shoot hundreds of photos on
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more relaxed approach to
composition; by shooting
hundreds of photographs we
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one decent shot in our
memory card’s large collection
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Thanks to applications such
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it’s also possible to turn a
mediocre shot into a better
image by recomposing it
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we may be unaware of
distracting objects at the side
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cropping can remove these
objects with ease and create
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Cropping can overcome
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In effect you can ‘zoom in’ on
a subject by cropping the shot
to make it more prominent
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ODQGVFDSHV\RXFDQFURSWRchange the balance of the
scene by making the sky
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You can also use the Crop tool
to straighten tilted horizons
and thus create a more
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Although DPP has a crop
overlay grid to help you get
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does lack the useful rule of
thirds overlay grid that can be
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SURJUDPVVXFKDV3KRWRVKRSClever cropping in DPP
Turn quick snaps into considered compositions with post-production cropping
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