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CANONSCHOOL
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 six years.01 PLACE A CONTROL POINT
Download curves_start.CR2 file (link
above). Go to View>Edit image window.
Click on the Tone Curve tab, and click to
place a control point on the middle of the
curve (input level 128 for both the X and
Y boxes). You can also type in the values.02 BRIGHTEN IT UP
As you drag the control point upwards
you give the midtones a brighter output
level. The underlying histogram graph
will slide towards the right to show the
presence of more highlights. Drag so
that X is 104 and Y is a brighter 195.03 REDUCE SHADOW CLIPPING
Place another control point near the
bottom left of the curve to tweak the
shadows. Drag it so that X is 30 and Y
is 85. This remaps darker shadow input
levels to a lighter output level, helping
reduce clipping in the darker sections.STEP BY STEP ADJUST CURVES
Remap a photograph’s tones by dragging control points on a curve
n our ongoing
examination of Digital
Photo Professional 4
we’ve covered several
ways to overcome
exposure problems. Each
method has its advantages
and disadvantages. You can
quickly adjust the image’s
overall exposure using the
Brightness slider, but this
can produce overexposed
highlights or underexposed
shadows. When tackling anunderexposed photo you can
try using the Auto Lighting
Optimizer to quickly brighten
up the shot and boost contrast.
However, this tool’s subtle
tone-tweaking effect will
only get you part of the way
towards a healthy spread of
tones. The Advanced panel’s
Shadow and Highlight sliders
enable you to target different
tones independently of each
other, helping you build on
the exposure improvementsyou’ve made with the tone-
tweaking tools. A combination
of these slider-based tools
should be enough to help
you make most incorrectly
exposed images look better.
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in the battle for a healthy
exposure then you can use
curve-based tools. Curves
enable you to selectively
lighten or darken a shot’s tonal
levels in selective and effective
ways. In our previous lessonwe touched on curve-based
editing by looking at how
the Gamma Adjustment panel
lets you tweak the shape of a
curve using sliders. This slider
approach is like riding a bike
using stabilizers – you’re
limited in your freedom to
operate. For greater control
we’ll turn to the Tone Curve
panel, as this enables us to
place control points anywhere
on a tone curve to lighten or
GDUNHQVSHFLÀFWRQDOOHYHOVAdjust tones using curves
Master the tricky, but powerful, Tone Curve tool to create a correct exposure
I
DOWNLOAD PROJECT FILES
TO YOUR COMPUTER FROM:
http://downloads.
photoplusmag.com/pp154.zip