HOW It WORKS Adjust tonal levels

use Digital Photo Professional 4’s level adjusting tools to create a shot with a wider dynamic range

01 HELPFUL HISTOGRAM

We can see from the photo’s original histogram that it is underexposed. The graph is clumped towards the shadows at the left and the midtones in the middle. There’s no strong highlight information at the right. This is a classic example of an underexposed shot’s histogram.

02 CLIPPING WARNING

The Show Highlight/shadow Warning displays clipped (underexposed) shadows as blue patches, which print as pure black. Clipped (overexposed) highlights appear as red patches, which will be white. By default, DPP 4 uses a wide threshold to display clipped shadows and highlights that can cause clipping warnings to appear where they’re not really needed (which can cause you to over-process your shot). We show you how to reduce the threshold warning so that only the darkest and brightest pixels will be indicated.

03 GLOBAL ADJUSTMENTS

Before selectively targeting and tweaking specific tonal ranges we need to boost the value of the Brightness slider. This is the equivalent of opening the camera’s aperture to let in more light. Increasing the Brightness to 1.33 will reduce the amount of shadow clipping and reveal detail in the darker regions. However, it will cause some of the brightest highlights to become clipped, so we need to make some selective tonal adjustments to restore missing highlight detail.

04 RESTORE HIGHLIGHTS

After the Brightness slider adjustment has clipped the whitest highlights you can restore some of the detail in these areas by dragging this slider left. This slider provides an easy way to control tone-mapping curves. You’ll notice that the curve overlapping the histogram’s brighter pixels dips down a little.

05 REMAP THE HIGHLIGHTS

If some of your brightest highlights are still clipped (and so lack detail), then drag this highlight level slider to the right. The red clipping patches will diminish. This tool can remap pixels that have an input level greater than 255 to a lower (less bright) output level.

06 REMAP THE MIDTONES

Drag this slider to the left to remap the midtones to a lighter (brighter) level. This reveals more shadow and midtone detail.

07 REMAP SHADOW LEVELS

If you drag this slider to the left you can lighten the darkest shadows. Here we’ve positioned it so that there’s a hint of shadow clipping in the darkest regions. It’s good to have some black shadows (and white highlights) in a shot to give it a healthy contrast.