HOW It WORKS selective tone adjustment

Use Digital Photo Professional 4’s tone tweaking tools to lighten shadows while preserving highlight detail

FLOAT A PANEL

By right-clicking on the top-left of a panel you can undock it from the side and drag it anywhere in the workspace. This helps you keep important panels, such as the Histogram, close at hand.

ORIGINAL HISTOGRAM

We set the camera to capture the boat’s highlight detail, causing most of the shadows to be underexposed. The ‘before’ histogram shows lots of shadows clumped towards the left, and many midtones in the middle.

REMAPPED HISTOGRAM

After processing the shot, the histogram’s shadows and midtones have slid towards the right, showing the presence of brighter pixels. Despite brightening up the image, we’ve managed to avoid overexposing the highlights, so there’s no strong peak at the far right of the graph.

rgb VALUES

Colours and tones are created by mixing Reds, Greens and Blues together. Pure black shadows have an RGB value of 0,0, 0, while bright white highlights have an RGB value of 255, 255, 255. As you move the cursor around the image you can read (or meter) the RGB values of a particular area. Here we’ve place the cursor on the sunlit boat so we can see the RGB highlight values are close to maximum. This RGB display helps us spot areas that are in danger of clipping (so we can tweak the relevant sliders to claw back more detail in high-contrast areas).

BRIGHTNESS SLIDER

This slider simulates letting in more overall light, brightening up the shadows and highlights equally. As our start image’s highlights are already correctly exposed, we can’t push this slider too far without clipping the highlights.

AUTO LIGHTING OPTIMIZER

You can fine-tune the results of this auto tone-correcting tool using its slider. However, if you enable your Canon’s Highlight Tone Priority setting then the ALO cannot be applied to the resulting Raw image.

SELECTIVE ADJUSTMENTS

Toggle open the Advanced panel to make selective tonal adjustments. This is particularly useful when processing high-contrast scenes. Here we’ve selectively lightened the underexposed shadows to reveal colour and detail in the bridge, while reducing the brightness of the highlights to stop the sunlit boat from being clipped.

COLOR SATURATION

After brightening shadows, the newly revealed colours can look a bit drab. Give them more impact by boosting the shot’s saturation.