DPP’S Tone Adjustment tool

Adjust curves to tweak shadows, midtones and highlights, as Peter travers explains

If shooting in a highcontrast location, it can be a challenge to capture detail throughout the scene’s tonal range. If you expose for the brightest highlights, the shadows are plunged into underexposed darkness, hiding interesting detail. By opening the aperture (or slowing down the shutter speed), you can reveal more shadow detail, but you run the risk of blowing out (or clipping) the highlights.

To shoot our high-contrast street scene, we set our Canon’s metering mode to Evaluative, so that our camera would measure the light in both the brighter and darker parts of the scene, then attempt to capture detail throughout the frame. Our shadows in the unprocessed version of the image are still too dark and the highlights lack detail, but as we’re shooting in Raw format, we can be relatively confident that Canon’s Digital Photo Professional 4 (DPP4) can help restore missing detail in both the clipped shadows and highlights, creating a more evenly exposed image.

The power of curves

DPP4’S Basic palette can brighten up an underexposed image and selectively lighten shadows and darken highlights, but these sliders only work up to a point. If the contrast is too strong, you need to delve into the Tone Adjustment tool palette and selectively target and tweak specific shadow, midtone and highlight details with more power and accuracy. Tone curves enable you to create a more evenly balanced exposure when other tonetweaking tools fail.