CANON DPP 4
The Canon Magazine 83
VIDEO ALSO ONLINE TONE CURVES
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HISTOGRAM
Choose View>Histogram Palette to
see a visual representation of your
unprocessed image’s exposure. The
tones are bunched up towards the
left, indicating that the shot is very
underexposed. It has some strong
levels peaking in the shadow end of
the graph at the left, but the
brightest highlights at the right of the
graph peter out near the middle of
the histogram. This tells us that the
brightest highlights have levels that
are more like muddy midtones.
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TONE CURVE PANEL
Click this tab to access Digital Photo
Professional 4’s powerful curve-
based tone tweaking tools.
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RESET BUTTON
When moving multiple points on a
tone curve it’s easy to lose control of
your adjustment and produce blown
out highlights or underexposed
shadows. You may also notice garish
colours appearing. If things get out of
hand, click here to reset your curve to
a diagonal straight line. Once the line
is straight then no curve-based
adjustments are being made to the
levels of the underlying histogram.
You can then start adjusting the
curve from scratch.
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RGB CURVE
By editing points on an RGB curve
you can adjust colour and tone at the
same time, producing more vibrant
colours. To limit the adjustment to
tones only, tick the Luminance RGB
button. You can see the strength of
the individual Red, Green and Blue
channels on the histogram graph.
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BEFORE & AFTER
Click here to toggle between the
original histogram and the edited
version. This helps you see if your
curve edits are creating a wider
and healthier spread of tones.
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CONTROL POINTS
Click anywhere on a curve to add
a control point. Here we’ve place
a point near the middle (where the
midtones lie). By dragging the point
upwards we’ve remapped midtones’
original underexposed input levels
to a brighter output level. This adds
some brighter highlights to the right
of our histogram. You can add up to
eight control points to a curve. To
delete a particular control point click
on it and tap the Delete key.
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X & Y – INPUT & OUTPUT
A shot’s tones consist of a series of
numerical levels. Black shadows have
a level of 0. White highlights have a
level of 255. The control points on a
curve enable you to remap the input
levels to healthier output levels. The
X box shows the selected control
point’s weak input level of 104.
Pushing the control point up has
remapped the midtones to a brighter
output level in the Y box of 195.
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RGB
The millions of colours in your
digital photographs are created
by mixing three channels together
- Reds, Greens and Blues.
NON-DESTRUCTIVE EDITS
It’s easy to get carried away when
editing curves but don’t worry;
your Raw file’s original tones can’t
be destroyed. To go back to the
beginning, chose Adjustment>
Revert to Shot Settings.JARGON BUSTER
HOW IT WORKS CORRECT TONES WITH CURVES
Use Digital Photo Professional 4’s Tone Curve panel to selectively adjust shadows, midtones and highlights
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Can I use DPP 4?
Download the latest version of DPP
from http://bit.ly/get_dpp. Check
the website to see if your DSLR is
compatible with DPP 4 – you’ll need
your serial number to update. DPP 4
works with most recent Canon EOS
DSLRs, but for older cameras you
may have to use a previous version.