What is an account? How can I create one?

A simple tutorial to figure out what a registration of an account is for, with an in-depth analysis of Gmail for Google Android and Apple ID for iPhone and iCloud.

The concept of "Account", if you don't know what it is, might seem something difficult to understand. It is actually a very simple thing to understand. Long story short: it is the sum of an Username and a Password. But let's analyze the concept in more detail:

Basic explanations

There are billions of people connected to the internet, and there are also many websites that offers personalized content, or allow you to create content, different for each users and that must be hidden to the other users of the platform.

Think of your home banking: you want to see your balance, but you want it to remain private. Other examples are social networks like Facebook, Instagram or any other: each user has a list of friends and pages that follows, and the contents are different for each person that uses the same service. But how can a website understand that you are the person to whom show a certain content? You must be able to make yourselves recognized.

First of all, you need to have an email address. Email addresses are those with the @, and are unique: no one could have the same email address all over the world. Once you register your personal email, it will become impossible for anyone else make one exactly identical as yours. In order to be identified on the internet, generally, we rely on the e-mail address (or an username, as we'll see later).

In order to have an email it is necessary to register with a "provider" (the company who offers an email service). This means that we must give our name, surname, date of birth and often other peronal data to a company that will provide us an email address. For security reason, you are asked to also choose a password, which should be known only by the person who is registering the email address. This makes hard for anyone to read someone else's emails because, even if they know their address, they does not know the password. It's like to know the address of someone: you can go in front of his house, but you cannot enter, because you don't have the keys (the password). Among the most famous email providers there are Google (gmail), Microsoft (outlook), Apple (me.com), etc...

So what does it mean to register an account? It's simple: you've just registered your email address and you have choosed one password? Perfect, you have just created your first account. An Email Account. From here on, things get simpler. You already have an email address, and for most website that's enough to identify you. To open another account, you just have to press "Register", give your email, choose a password (that should be different for security reasons) and you can create all the accounts you want, without having to give your personal data every time (name, surname, etc.) although sometimes they are still needed. Imagine, for example, creating an account for an online store, obviously it will be necessary to know your real name and address, to be able to send the goods to your home.

What is a username?

Above we wrote that you need an email in order to create an account. This is not exact. Many websites allows you to hide your email address, or even don't give it at all. Instead of an email address you are allowed to choose a username, that is a unique name, but without the @. In fact you can use any letter or symbol you want, the important is that nobody on that website uses the same username as you. On some website the term username is used as synonymous of email address, that is wrong and makes things a little messy: they are different things. An email address must look like name@something.com. The part before the @ is up to you, the part after the @ defines your provider and is mandatory. On the other side a username could be anything, as example @#MyNameIs123#@ and should be completely up to you if you wanto to use only letters, numbers, symbols or a combination of anything. An username could also be a number, as example Whatsapp uses your phone number to create your account.

The importance of passwords

There are many different services on internet, starting from the above mentioned purchases in online stores, that excellent for those who lives far from large cities and its shops, like me. There are forums where you can discuss your interests, social networks like Instagram or Facebook where we can share our activities, blogs and websites where we can read and write anything we like. As we've seen, to access and create content on most online services, you will first need to register an account in order to be identified. Almost everyone is registered on dozens of websites, and everyone should always try to remember their login data. It sounds strange, but many people hardly remember the passwords they use, some don't even remember their email address. In fact, username and password are informations that must be taken seriously. I like to compare them to the bunch of keys in your pocket, I bet you pay attention to them. Your "password collection" should deserve at least the same attention. So you should choose a password that's hard to guess and almost impossible to forget. Use symbols, meaningless words, nicknames, dates, whatever you want, but try to come up with a safe one. It's really important to avoid words with a meaning, because are really easy to guess, you can combine letters and symbols for more security. As instance password or 123456 are the weaker password you can ever choose, but 123!password456! could be a tought one. Be smart.

There are two other things worth mentioning: Use multiple passwords: at least three different ones. Depending on the service you connect to you should use a different attention. A simple password can be used for less relevant things (entertainment sites, forums, etc ..), a password of medium difficulty should be used for medium important things (video games, secondary email addresses, e-commerce sites without payment info, etc. and finally a very secure password for important services like your primary email adress, home banking, or the ones with payment infos (as example PayPal). This is because the more important is the service, the more security there is. If an hacker is able to steal your password from the "hunting and fishing forum", he should not be able to use the same password to access your bank account. If you use the same password, you will allow anyone to enter in any of your account, and this is crazy.

The second thing to say is that passwords distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters. To better understand, "PasSwoRd" is different from "password". So it is a good practice to use some capital letters and some symbols. An example of another fairly secure password could be "ILoveChocolate100%". Obviously the one I use is completely different, even if I love chocolate.

Importance of an account in mobile phones era

Now that almost anyone has a smartphone in his pocket the registration of an account is even more important. There are a lot of advantages if you have an account of the manifacturer of your phone. Actually there are two main players: Apple with its iPhone and iPad and Google, that is the developer of Android, that is used in almost every other phone in the market: Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Motorola, Sony and so on.

The developers of operting systems like Andorid (Google) and iOS (Apple) provides more than a simple phone: you can download different apps from the stores, you can buy music, movies, books and newspapers. You can use emails, calendar, maps or set up a cloud backup solution.

Cloud backup of your data in your account

As I stated above, there are thousands of services that are offered by registering the right account for your product: social networks, online videogames and many others, but one is absolutely the most important: the one of the developer of your phone.

If you have an Android phone, software is provided by Google, and you will need a Gmail account. That's the only option, something@gmail.com and it gives you access to a huge number of Google services as: Google Play, Google Drive, Google Maps, Youtube, Google News, Google Photo, Google Translator and many other.

On the other side there is Apple and its Apple ID. You can use any email you want to create an Apple account, it also gives you the access to many Apple services as App store and Apple Store, Apple Maps, iCloud, iTunes, Facetime and many others.

On both operating systems there is one function that I believe is more important than any other: Online backup. Let's create an ideal situation: you have a phone full of pictures, videos, phone numbers, reminders of important things and coversations. For some reason the phone breaks or worse, it is stolen from you. You will immediately think: It's a disaster!!!.

Not necessarily. For some years now, smartphones have been able to copy important informations “on the clouds", it means that, if you want it, you will be able to activate a function that will allow your phone to sync all the data you want, as phone numbers, pictures, calendar or anything else, using internet in a "cloud service". But what does "in the cloud" means in simple terms? It simply means "in the computer of someone else". In this specific case, on the servers of Google or Apple, generally in the USA. These data are accessible only inside your account and only after you have typed your username and password.

Let's repeat the concept in an even simpler way: The phone sends all the data that you decide to share to the manufacturer, which will keep "on his computers" a backup copy, in case you have trouble with the phone. That way, if you lose or break your smartphone, you just have to buy another of the same type, type your username and password and the phone will download everything again from internet. This function is extremely convenient if it is used wisely, but I am convinced that there are some people who inadvertently share data without even knowing it. I suggest everyone to spend some time to check the various settings of the privacy of their devices, just to make sure there are no unwanted shares.

Copying data to the "cloud" is a function that is really a godsend. Think about the convenience of having your contacts, all calendar appointments, emails, text notes and all the various documents safe "in the cloud", on the servers of your favorite company, all backed up in case of smartphone breakage or loss. Not bad.

There are obviously many privacy risks, which you can easily imagine, but the advantages are undoubtedly greater than the disadvantages, especially if you make a conscious use of what you share and you use a secure password.

How do I access this data?

In the case your devices is unusable, the easies way to view the data you have "in the cloud" into your account is to access with a computer to the manufacturer's website. If you are using a stranger computer should be a good idea to use an "incognito window" of the browser, or simply remember to logout at the end of the session. When you reach the correct website, just enter your credentials (username and password) and you will have access the most of your informations contained in the cloud of your account. Next we will see, for both Google and Apple, the most commonly used cloud services. Remember that there are hundreds of companies that allows you to backup your files on the cloud, but these are the only two who also makes phones, so theyr services are natively installed on your device. For both Google and Apple there are other services that will be accessible after you have created your account, like translations, music, health and so on.

I will repeat it till I'll become boring: you have to remember your login details to access all the data, so it's really important to memorize your email and password. Imagine to be on a foreign country, with a broken phone and the address of the hotel, or an important number, on the cloud, but you can't remember the password.

If you want to check what you are sharing, or if you want to be sure that your important files are really backed up, you can follow the links down here. I suggest you to use a computer. Not everything you share is shown on the next links.

If you liked this tutorial here you can find all the pages we've written for improving your photographs with Gimp. If you liked our work, you could consider to ❤support us: by clicking here you can see how.

Darktable Guide: RAW files develpment and import into Gimp

Tutorial on how to install Darktable, how to use it to develop RAW files and how to import those RAW directly in Gimp.

Darktable is a free software for RAW files development, it can work independently, as a standalone program, but it is also perfectly compatible with Gimp. In this tutorial we will go to see how to install darktable, how to open and develop a Raw file with Darktable tools and finally how to import into Gimp the RAW file developed using Darktable.

First of all I would like to be sure that you know what "RAW file" means, if you don't, I invite you to read this tutorial, where you can better understand what are the features and advantages of the "digital negatives".

What is Darktable?

Gimp doesn't natively support RAW files, if you try to open one, you will receive an error that tells that is impossible to proceed without first installing a Raw loader. There are several programs for developing RAW files with Gimp: Darktable is simply one of these programs.

I think Darktable is the best because it has a complete interface and advanced tools, that allow you to do an amazing Raw development, and its tools are even better than the tools of Canon DPP, that is the software that I normally use for RAW development, of which I wrote a tutorial that you can read here. The perfect Gimp integration is another advantage.

Install Darktable

First you need to go to the Darktable website, in the section "install". Proceed by selecting your OS, and download the installer. The installation for Windows is absolutely traditional and cannot create any difficulty, just press "next" a few times.
Once installed, there will be no particular windows or configurations. From that moment it will be sufficient to open a RAW file with a double click of the mouse to have the possibility to use Darktable.
If you already have a predefined program, which your computer has automatically associated with the Raw files, just click on the file with the right mouse button and then select Open with, a menu will pop up with all possible programs associated with that type of file, including Darktable. Of course, we can also proceed by opening Darktable first, and then opening the file directly within the program.

As mentioned at the beginning of the tutorial, Darktable is a standalone software, which does not need Gimp to work. However, we want it to function as a part of Gimp, how can we do it then? It is actually quite simple. First you will have to be careful to close Gimp during the installation of Darktable, if not, you will have to close it and open again after the installation. At this point it is done. Once the program is installed, simply open the RAW directly with Gimp, Darktable will open automatically: the moment you go to close the photo with the X your RAW photograph will automatically be exported, converted and uploaded to Gimp. Again, if you already have another default program to manage RAW files and you want to open Gimp and Darktable from the windows folders, just click on the RAW file with the right mouse button and then select Open with  → Gimp.

How to use Darktable

A premise: this site was born as a collection of tutorials for Gimp, which is simpler and more effective in photo editing. The steps of Darktable that we are going to illustrate will be limited to the digital development of a RAW file: the recovery of high lights, shadows, white balance and color management. For everything else (straighten, crop, smoothing, cut and paste), we suggest you to use Gimp, maybe consulting our tutorials.

If for some reason you want to study Darktable further, on their site there is a complete and very detailed manual, which you can read by clicking here.

Once you open the RAW file with Gimp, you will see the Darktable screen, which you can see below. I anticipate that the program may seem quite complex, but don't let it scare you. We're going to use only part of the tools and with the help of this guide you will see that it is not so difficult. I tried to reduce the screen as much as possible, yours will appear wider and with more free space.

In the main window I highlighted the most important things. Let's have a quick look, then we'll go and see them in detail. At the top left we can the logo and the version of the program, at the top right make sure you are inside the Darkroom section. Just below you can see a gear, from which you can access the countless settings of the program. In the middle we see the preview of the photo we are working on, on the right there are two icons in which we will find all the tools (called modules) that we will see in this Darktable tutorial. Below are some other modules, hidden inside the Other modules section, if you want to dig inside the program. Then there's a small little button below the preview, like this, over under exposed which is used to toggle the over/under exposure indication. I recommend you to activate it when you are adjusting the exposure, but deactivate it from time to time to get a clearer view of what you are doing. On the preview picture you can see red and blue dots, especially on the arm. The "white" areas are highlighted in red, the "black" areas in blue.
On the right you can see a chart, it is called histogram, and it is quite important. If you don't know what it is, we suggest you read this tutorial. On darktable the various effects are called modules and do not act "destructively" on the photograph. If we apply too much contrast, we can lower it at any time. If we set a wrong white balance, we can fix it as many times as we want. The changes are only definitively applied once the program is closed and the image is exported into Gimp, not while you are working inside Darktable.

The Basic Group tab

Basic group tab: it is the one we're going to see in this tutorial. Inside it there are all the fundamental tools for the development of a RAW file, here on the left you can see the icon with which the Basic group tab is represented. We are not going to analyze all the modules because, as we said at the beginning, we want to focus on tools that are useful and not reproducible in Gimp. In the screens you'll see below we have applied the settings that we used for our photography, not the default ones.
All the tools are "closed" (minimized) by default, so you have to click on their name to open them, you can open only one at a time. On the left of each instrument there is a very small icon, that allows you to turn on or off that particular module, so you can see the result "with" and "without" the edit in the preview. The icon appears like this: switch modules on and off.

Base curve: Curves are a wonderful and powerful tool, but it is essential to well understand how them works. If you don't know how to use them, I strongly suggest you to read our guide to the use of curves for adjusting contrast and brightness. All files imported into Darktable have a curve already applied, which was decided by the camera manufacturer. At the top right you can see two small icons, which we has highlighted in red.
The one on the left is called Restore parameters and returns the curve to "flat", the one on the right, called Preset, opens a list of the different presets of the various manufacturers' brands. We have preferred to work on a flat curve.
Another important thing to say is that we strongly advise you to leave the curve adjustment as the last step, because it is a "fine" adjustment of all the parameters which you're going to modify next. What I did was first of all to return the curve to a "flat" one, using the "reset parameters" button, and then I worked on the other tools. After I got the correct exposure, hue and saturation of the colors, finally I adjusted the curve as you can see here on the left.

Exposure: The exposure module is what allows us to raise or lower the "brightness" of our photography. By playing with this slider, you can notice that the areas that apparently are "white", because overexposed, or "black" because underexposed, actually contain an incredible amount of detail. The magic of RAW files. Our picture is pretty dark, because it was taken in backlight, so we increased the exposure a lot, up to +2.30 EV. An extremely interesting feature of Darktable is the Black Level Correction slider, whose result is easier to explain using an example: in our photograph of the dog, even after raising the brightness, the mouth and nose remained almost completely black. Going to act on the Black level correction cursor, we lightened the black areas a little, but without affecting the brightness of the other parts of the picture.

White Balance: First of all I suggest you read our white balance tutorial if you do not have idea of what it is, because it is one of those things that any self-respecting photographer should know perfectly.
White balance can be extremely important, as absolutely useless. Let's explain it better: modern cameras are incredibly good at taking a correct white balance almost flawlessly. Generally, white balance is perfect. The reasons for making changes in this module are usually "artistic", not "technical". What I mean is that sometimes we want to give a certain dominance to our photographs. It makes sense to give a warmer color, a reddish tone, to the photo of a sunset or a group of people in front of a firecamp, it makes sense to give a slightly colder color, a bluish tone, to a photo taken at night or in the snow, it makes sense to enhance a little bit the green in panoramic photo with a lot of nature. These are all modifications that make sense, but in reality you could easily leave the automatic white balance and the photo would still, at least technically, be correct. This is because the camera software is practically perfect in 99% of the cases. Perfect doesn't mean it's the way we want it to be, so I decided to increase the green tones to give the lawn more presence and slightly increase also the red, to not lose the shading of the hair of Akita's puppy, which tends naturally to orange.
Another way to adjust the white balance is to go to change the color temperature in kelvin degrees, so you can work on the temperature slider, without having to manually change the three shades. An example where adjusting the colour temperature could be ideal is interior photography, if you know the type and color temperature of lights used.
A third way to act, the simplest, is to select a preset among those proposed, the small down arrow on the right, next to the Preset, indicates that clicking this item a drop-down menu will open, with several options.

Color Correction: In this section we are going to change the color saturation. Opposite to the previous tools, this module is on another tab, you can find it on Color group 🠞 Color Correction Module. The screenshot here on the left should help you find it. The saturation can easily be changed inside Gimp, but I prefer to set it in Darktable because the RAW files contains much more color informations.
It is not a reason motivated by the fact that I noticed a particular difference, it is just logical tought. In any case we have put a relatively high value, this is because the RAWs of semi-professional cameras, at least mine, with absolutely neutral settings, tend to be pretty desaturated.

Clarifications

There are many other modules, but we wanted to keep the tutorial as light and simple as possible. There are alternative tools for almost everything we have explained, and there are also many tools that we have just ignored, but we believe that this is the way easier and more efficient to get started. Maybe curves are not a very simple concept, but once you understand them, they will prove to be a tool that you will thank us for introducing you. Once you have applied all the corrections to your RAW file, just close darktable with the X in the top right corner, to upload the modified file to Gimp. Remember that doing this step will apply all the changes. Below I leave you with the photo before and after the RAW file development.

Before development with Darktable

After development with Darktable

Conclusions

I'm sure this photograph isn't perfect yet. In fact, it is just the development of a RAW file that still need to be fixed with Gimp. We could make the puppy a bit more bright, we could saturate the lawn a little bit more, slightly desaturate the skin of the hands, add a Soft Focus effect to emphasize the softness of the dog's hair. Long story short, this is a tutorial for the development of a RAW with Darktable, but the work for a beautiful photograph doesn't end with the development of the RAW.

Another extremely important tutorial that I think you should know is the photo blending, which allows you to get a higher dynamic range, that is perfect in the case a photograph that is more difficult to balance than this one, I suggest you read it.

If you liked this tutorial here you can find all the pages we've written about photographic technique. If you liked our work, you could consider to ❤support us by clicking here you can see how.

Canon Digital Photo Professional (DPP) Tutorial

A complete and easy tutorial for RAW image processing, viewing and editing, with Canon Digital Photo Professional (DPP).

Canon Digital Photo Professional (DPP) is a free, high-performance software provided by Canon for processing one or more RAW files in sequence (batch). First of all, do you know what a RAW file is? If you don't you absolutely need to read this tutorial Coming back in topic, Canon Digital photo Professional main functions is to develop a RAW file, by finely tune the white balance, saturation and color tone, but above all it gives you a huge control of exposure of your photos, with separate settings for lights and shadows, giving you the possibility to recovery overexposed or underexposed areas in a way that is unthinkable with a traditional photographic formats (.jpg or .tif).

DPP is supplied in boundle with the purchase of a Reflex or a Mirrorless camera, both Aps-c and Full Frame manifactured by Canon.

Download Digital Photo Professional

If you are no longer able to find the original CD, you can download DPP from the official Canon website. It's not easy to give you a link, because you have to go on the Canon website, find the model of your camera, choose the download section and then insert the serial code of your camera, in order to download the application. This link is the official help topic. It's not exactely a user friendly way, but the software worth the pain.

Disclaimer

First of all I would like to tell you that this is a tutorial for RAW image processing with DPP, not the Canon Digital Photo Professional instruction manual. The following explanations are complete, but we will not explain what's the purpouse of every button and setting. This tutorial will tell you how to create the best possible Standard dynamic range file from your Raw, but we suggest to use Gimp for the last tunings or editing, so some tools that are available on Gimp (better) will not be deeply discussed.

Main Window

The main window of Canon Digital Photo Professional appears as the image below. I've "ghosted" the less interesting sections and I've reduced the size of the window: your will look the same, but way wider.

On the top there is the classical toolbar, that we'll deepen after in this guide. On the left part there are the folders on your computer, mine are in Italian, you have to select a folder with some raw on it. When you select the folder, the other windows will populate: on the top there are three spaces for the filters, on the bottom there are the thumbnails of the photos.

Filters allows you to choose to show only a particular set of pictures, filtered by date, by body of the camera or by lens. If you want to use filter to sort the photos, remember to set the switch: Filter → ON

If you don't like how the thumbnails appears, you can change the size and a lot of other otpions on the Thumbnails menu on the top toolbar. There you can show or hide File name, shooting infos, and change the way the pictures are sorted and the size of thumbnails. On the bottom of the interface there are some useful icons to change some of the options faster. zoom thumbnails

On the top toolbar you can also change the appearance of Canon DPP. Clicking on View on the top toolbar you can change the visualization: Vertical (Ctrl+Shift+E) or Horizontal (Ctrl+E) thumbnails will place the thumbnails on a side, leaving space for a large preview of the photo, or you can go on Open/Close panel to show or hide part of the Digital Photo Professional interface. It's also possible to set the DPP window Full-Screen or you can (Alt+Enter). On the bottom there are some icons that allows you to change appearance without using the View Menu.

Once selected the photo you want to edit, you have to press the button on the top left corner: Edit Image. You can select more than one photo, clicking on each one holding Ctrl Key, or even select all in the menu Edit → Select all (Ctrl+A) before pressing Edit Image. Do not double click the photo, it only opens a larger preview, use the Edit Image button on the top right part of DPP interface, or Press CTRL+Right arrow.

Edit a Raw with DPP

Once you've pressed Edit Image, a window full of useful tools will appear. On the top right there is a small arrow: back arrow it's used to exit the edit mode and go back to the main window. On the top toolbar there is a section called Preview, where there are a lot of useful settings:

• You can divide the window in a before/after comparison, horizzontally or vertically, with two full images or dividing a single image in the middle. There are also some useful icons for activate this function on the bottom left of the DPP interface.
• You can change the Zoom, this function also can be changed with icons on bottom.
• You can show or hide the AutoFocus (AF) points
• You can enable the Higlight/Shadow Warning (the indispensable function in which the overexposed and underexposed areas of the photo are highlighted)

From the vertical toolbar on the left, it is possible to select the photograph to be modified, in the center we will see the selected image and on the right there are the editing tools (which we will examine later). If the editing window is hidden you have to press one of the icons highlighted in red in the next picture, on the bottom right.

The tools of DPP

Tools of Digital Photo Professional are divided into nine sections, every editing you could ever need to do, can be done in one of that nine sections, except for HDR (that we will see later), so is a good idea to take a bit of time to study and understand the tools of every section, let's see what there is to learn:

The Lens Correction allows you to correct the defect of your lens. It works only for Canon lenses and allows you to correct different things: Chromatic aberration, Color Blur, Peripheral illumination, Distortion and Sharpness. There is also a Digital Lens Optimizer that works only if you download the Lens Data.
Every correction must be enabled (click the little white square on the left of the name), then you need to set the slider to make the correction more or less present. Is better if you try yourself if your lenses needs or not this kind of corrections, it's up to you. Normally I don't apply any correction, except for chromatic aberration when needed, because I think it is the only one unaesthetic, the other are characteristics of the lenses.

 The Crop and rotate images section allows you to cut and straighten your photo: First of all you have to choose an aspect ratio from the drop-down menu, then you just have to click any part of the picture with Left Mouse Button, then drag the crop area. Always remember that there are some standard aspect ratios that should always be preferred for your crops, as you can read in this dedicated tutorial.
If you need to rotate the image, just use the slider. I really think that this section is so easy to use, that you don't need any other information. When you crop a picture, keep in mind the Rules of the Thirds. Once you are happy of the crop, just click on another section and crop will automatically be applied.

The two next sections, Adjust specific areas and Remove dust from images or apply a stamp are two sections that should allow you to use a "Paintbrush Tool" on the photo. This tools should be really helpful, but I honestly think they are absolutely worse than Gimp's tools, so I really suggest you to use Gimp for cloning and brighten specific areas. The problems that I've found with these tools are that they are really high demanding for your processor and that is not possible to undo an error unless you completely undo the brush stroke, and this is absolutely insane. So believe me when I say that Gimp's brushes are far way better. The only problem is that I've not traslated the tutorials yet.. In a few weeks they should be available (I'll link both there).

Here things start to get serious.

I said I'm not really happy with the brushes of DPP. A complete different story is the section Perform basic image adjustment, that is absoulutely perfect. If you shoot in Raw format (and if you don't, do it from now), the tools that you will find here will allow you correct saturation, white balance, and recover an underexposed or overexposed shot in a way that is unthinkable with traditional softwares. If you don't use Photoshop or Lightroom to edit your Raw files, these tools of Digital Photo Preofessional are absolutely necessary to give a professional look to your photographs.
If you want to edit your photo with Gimp, you have to use a file that has a limited dynamic range (8 bit per channel as .tif or .jpg), so first of all you always have to use DPP to "squeeze" as much as possible from the 12 bits of your Raw files. A raw file contains an incredible amount of informations from light and dark areas of your photos, more than your monitor is able to show, so is really important that you use DPP to recover any possible overexposed or underexposed area, before exporting the file to a low dynamic range, like .tif, that will be edited with Gimp.

As first you have to go on Preview on the top toolbar and activate Highlight/Shadow warning (or press CTRL+M). Thiss tool will let you know if there are white (overexposed) areas, that will appear in red, or black (underexposed) areas that will appear in blue. Now you can edit the Brightness (aka exposition) using the Brightness adjustment slider. Move it till you find the desired average brightness, we will tune high and low light later.

When you are happy with the brightness is time for the White balance. If you don't know what is, it's a kind of "light filter" that is used to counter a dominant color, given by different light sources. Light appears always the same when you look at things, because our brain is really good in white balance the things that we see through our eyes, but the light of a light bulb is completely different from a neon light or the Sun. Tipically the camera makes a great work with automatic white balance, but you could want to modify the results. Maybe you want to make a sunset more redish, or a night photography more bluish, or you just want to fix an innatural result of a strange light condition. Using the drop down menu you can choose one of the presets, or you can use the color picker tool and click any point that contains a white or gray that you want to use as sample. On Fine-tune, you can move refine the white balance: move the first slider to the left for a more blu tone, or to the right for an orange tone. The same applies to the second slider, with magenta on the left and green on the right.

The next section is Auto Lighting Optimizer. This is an automatism of Canon DPP that tries to adjust highlights and shadows, to balance the exposure in case of strong contrast or a photo against the light. Since it is an automatism, there are no complicated settings, you only have to decide whether to activate it and which of the three intensities you need. It's up to you to decide to activate it or not, but generally it only creates benefits.

Picture style allows you to choose a preset settings for certain types of shots. These are small corrections, for example Portrait will increase the amount of red, to improve the color of the skin, Panorama will increase the amount of green and blue, for more saturated meadows and skies. Personally I always leave it on automatic, and I manually modify the other parameters, but it could be interesting for those who want to minimize manual interventions, relying on DPP's automatisms.

Gamma adjustment is one of those settings that you should completely ignore, if you are a novice or you are not interested in complications. If you don't want to read technicalities, just skip a few lines to the next section. This is the histogram of the photograph, it allows you to see in realtime the curve you are going to apply when you change the settings of the Advanced menu just below. In addition to giving you a visual rapresentation of ​​what you are doing in the advanced menu, it's an extremely powerful tool to control the exposition: if you move the central bar (the vertical one I colored in red) you will be able to change the middle tones., to lighten or darken the image without touching the tones at the extremes of the histogram. It means that you can raise one or two stops of the midtones without burning the highlights, or lower one or two stops of the midtones without clipping the low lights. I suggest you to play a little with the settings. If you are not happy of what you've done, press Auto to reset. If you don't have idea of what an Histagram is, you can read this tutorial we wrote for Gimp, the concept are absolutely the same, and if you don't know what a curve is, we also have a Gimp tutorial for that. This is a really powerful tool, if you will learn how to use it, the results could be amazing.

Advanced section allows you to individually adjust contrast, shadows, light, color tone and saturation. This is absolutely the part of Digital Photo Professional which deserves more attention, because here you can give your photograph a professional look by adjusting these few sliders. A "standard" way to proceed could be to adjust the Contrast till you have a clear, sharp image with bright whites and deep blacks, but without clipping bright and dark areas. With the sliders of Shadow and Highlight you can finely tune the highlights and shadows individually. The goal is to have all the details visible, without losing too much contrast. The Color tone slider allows you to give a small magenta or green dominant, to tune the color balance, while the Saturation allows you to adjust the intensity of the colors. Usually the saturation of colors in professional cameras is always rather tenuous, so we always recommend to turn it up of, at least, one point (or 1.5), but pay attention to the color of people's skin, because raising too much saturation has terrible effects on skin tones. If you enable Sharpness, you can sharpen your photo. Adjust the sliders until you are happy, but be careful to not exaggerate.

Really often is hard to find the right settings for the whole photo. Many times the corrections that are perfect for background and dresses, are too aggressive for the colors of the skin. Or the perfect settings for the highlights makes the shadows way too dark. The solution to this problem is to make two (or more) separate Raw editing, one for each situation, then export two or more images and finally use Gimp to blend the right part of each photo together. We suggest you to consider this solution every time you struggle to perfectly balance the settings. It solves a lot of issues. Obviously we have the perfect tutorial for photo belnding with Gimp, that you can find here.

Other DPP Tools

Adjust image detail is the place where you can reduce the digital noise of the image. This step is necessary only if your photo has been taken with high ISO values, because the noise generated by the shots in high sensitivity is definitely problematic. This noise can be reduced through two sliders: Reduce luminance noise that will actually operate on the "real" noise and Reduce chrominance noise that will modify the way high sensitivity impacts the colors. Unfortunately, each diferent camera has a different noise pattern and amount, so there is no rule to tell you. Try to adjust the sliders till you are happy with digital noise reduction, without going to remove too many details from the photograph. Remember that noise reduction always takes a few before you can see the changes take effect, so don't expect to adjust the sliders and see immediately the result, it will take a moment of patience, if you have underperforming computers even two or three moments. Sharpness is the same that you could adjust in the previous section, but in this case it is applied after the noise reduction, so if you have a photo with a high ISO grain, keep the sharpness adjustment on the Advanced tab as low as possible and go to intervene on this.

Adjust image tone curves is a tool that allows you to increase or decrease contrast in a way that is a lot more precise than a slider cursor. You can modify the curve of the whole image, or of any single color channel. I'm sorry for the laziness, but I will link you the Gimp curves tutorial, because the way curves works in both softwares are absolutely the same.

The Adjust image colors tab is a screen for advanced users, who can adjust individually the saturation and amount of each individual color that composes the image. I honestly believe that, if someone really needs such subtle adjustments, then he is so much advanced that is not reading this tutorial. However, the three cursors use the HSL logic, where H is the Hue, S the saturation and L the Lightness. For each one of the colors present, it is possible to adjust these three parameters individually. For exaple you can use

The last Tab, Configure Basic Image Settings, is another really specific one. It allows you to modify the Work color space if you have a calibrated monitor or particular needs, like Adobe RGB or Apple RGB. You can also set advanced things about printing: you can setup CMYK for professional printers with four colors, or a printer profile. If someone has this kind of needs, should know better than me how to setup this tab.

The result

The last thing to see for this part of the DPP tutorial is one example of a fast and easy Raw editing. This photo has been taken at the parade of the "Festa delle Bande" in Cortina d'Ampezzo, to a group of sympathizers who passed with a traditional Tyrolean costumes. I live in the Alps, the mountains in the extreme north of Italy, and lederhosen (that strange pants) are a traditional dress of my land.

The instinctive shot has unfortunately led to a cut of part of the feet, to which I tried to remedy with a shin crop. I've applied an automatic optimization of light (at maximum setting), I've carefully tuned contrast, lights, shadows and I've added saturation. White balance has been made with the color picker on the shaded part under one of the folds of the left lady's shirt but the result were a little green, so I used automatic White Balance. Total work time: less than 5 minutes. The result is more than satisfactory, for the little time dedicated. This is for telling you that you don't have to spend hours to get a decent result. The result could have been better using another 5 minutes with Gimp to darken a little the background and desaturate the skin of the legs, arms and background, but this is a DPP tutorial.

Copy recipe

One of Canon Digital Photo Professional's amazing features is the ability to copy the development procedure of a photo and paste it into another one or more images. Let's take as example a case where you have 50 photos, all in very similar light conditions that requires almost identical development, for example a car race on a sunny day, 50 cars shooted always from the same position. In this case, manually applying the procedure described above (contrast, lens adjustment, light and shadows) for each of the 50 photos could be really boring. How can we solve? Easy: Copy recipe

First of all you have to select one of the pictures, press Edit image and change settings of the raw as you need. Then go back to the main screen by pressing the small arrow at the top left back arrow. Select the photo that you have just processed with the Right mouse button, then select Copy recipe or CTRL+ALT+C. Then you have to select all the other photos from Edit → Select all or only some, by holding CTRL and clicking them one by one. Press Right mouse button, then select Paste procedure or CTRL+SHIFT+V to apply the same settings to all selected images. In the case you have not identical pictures, the use of the filters explained at the beginning of the tutorial could be really useful, since different lenses may require different adjustments.

If you paste the recipe of a photo into anoter you will lose any modification you made before, so is a good idea if you firstly create a standard recipe to paste to every photo, then you can proceed with crop, rotation and any little tune that could be needed picture by picture.

Convert and save one or more photos

Once the photo has been edited, we have to convert it into a standard format, like .jpg (compressed, suitable for web publishing) or .tif (without compression, suitable for subsequent modifications or storage in the archive). The conversion can be made of a single selected image, going to File → Convert and save... or CTRL+D, or multiple selected images, going to File → Batch Processing or CTRL+B.

The conversion of a single photograph takes place in a window very similar to the one below, but with your Windows language for the names of the folders (the windows has been slightly reduced in width due to layout issues). At the top it is possible to select the folder where to export the file, while at the bottom we can decide the file name and format, using the Save as drop-down menu. On the output setting it is possible to set the image quality, the resolution, the possible redefinition measures and whether to incorporate or not the shooting information (EXIF).

Batch process... allows you to export multiple files simultaneously, so the setup window is slightly more complex. On the left there are all the photographs which we have selected. In the Destination folder we can determine in which folder save all the converted files, while on the Output settings we can set image quality, resolution, possible redefinition measures and whether to incorporate or not the shooting information (EXIF). In the File name section we can determine if you want to leave the original name, or if you want to create a new name and from what number start the numbering.

Once happy with everything, confirm pressing Execute button at the bottom right.

HDR

The final thing we're going to explain is how to create an HDR image using Canon Digital Photo Professional. HDRs are images that simulates an High dynamic range on low dynamic range monitors. Initially they were unpopular in the world of photography, but with the rise of smartphone photography they have begun to become more and more common.

To make an HDR with DPP, you must first choose a suitable photo, where there are strong contrasts and the difference between light and shadow areas is very marked. This DPP tutorial has been made on photographs of the musical festival, so I'm remaining on the subject, choosing an image of the preparation before the show. The subject was in the shadow of the interior of a building, while a hard light illuminates the whole background, burning the highlights.

A true HDR photo needs a high dynamic range, usually the best results are obtained with a tripod and three or more identical photographs, but at different exposures. This is impossible in an event, because the subjects don't remain motionless as a panorama would do, so we are forced to use a single photograph, which must necessarily be in RAW format.

To start the HDR tool you need to select the photo, then press on the top bar Tools → Start HDR compositing tool, or ALT+Y, then click on Start HDR compositing button. In this case we start from a single RAW file, if you could use three photographs with different exposure of a static subject you would have a better result. In this case, select all the three photos before pressing Start HDR compositing, if pictures have been taken freehand, select Auto Align. In the case you have three photographs with different exposure, you can also use the .jpg format, but RAW is always a better choice.

Once the HDR tool is started, a window like the one above will appear. The first three sliders: Brightness, Saturation and Contrast does not affect HDR intensity, so I recommend adjusting them first, to have a balanced exposure and saturated colors. Once you find the right compromise, you have to work on the three sliders below to get a high dynamic range picture. Let's see how they act:

• Strenght: is the parameter that establishes how much the HDR will be marked: the higher the intensity, more the exposures will be blended
• Smoothness: is the parameter that determines how much to "flatten the contrast"
• Fineness: Affects the sharpness of the outlines

Finding the right compromise between the three sliders is not easy, I suggest you try them out. Generally I leave the precision fairly low (0/30), uniformity pretty high (60/90) and then I work on the intensity. Once you find the right balance, adjust the brightness, saturation and contrast again to satisfy your personal tastes. Pay attention to the digital noise, because in HDR photos it tends to be much more visible. Once everything is ok, you need to press Save As at the bottom right.

If you liked this tutorial here you can find all the other tutorials we wrote about photography, or you can go there to take a look to our tutorials for post production with Gimp. If you liked our work, you could consider to ❤support us by clicking here you can see how.

Mora-Foto: tutorials for photography, Gimp and more

 Hello everyone!

Today marks the end of an era: after a good fifteen years of service, we have decided to suspend the domain www.mora-foto.it. This decision is not a goodbye, but a step towards a bigger future! Our energies are entirely dedicated to the new, ambitious project: www.ciaocortina.com, the unofficial tourist guide for discovering Cortina d'Ampezzo!

On the new site, you will find all the photography content you loved on the old one. As for the articles that do not fit the new project, we have moved them here on Blogger, where you can consult them as long as the service is available. To make navigation easier, here are all the pages you can find on the blog:

Photography guides:

Practice of photography:

• Edit a Raw with Canon DPP
• Darktable Guide: RAW files develpment and import into Gimp

Other tutorials:

• What is an account? How can I create one?