How to enhance colours using Canon’s Digital Photo Professional software

Digital Photo Professional, the software that comes free with your Canon camera, is a great way to edit your RAW images. The area in which the software particularly excels is in colour handling, enabling you to tweak tones and shades with absolute precision. This is particularly important for landscape shots, as an unusual colour cast can entirely change the mood of a photograph. So here’s our 6 step guide so you can edit your landscape shots to get realistic colours.

From this…

To this…

Here’s what you need to do

1. Open your shot
Start DPP and select the file dpp_start.CR2 from your disc. Click the Edit Image Window button on the main interface, and in this new editing window, click the Info option. Here you can see all the settings used in the original photo; the important one to note is White Balance, which is set to Daylight. This gives a colour temperature of around 5200k but looks a little green.

2. Change the white balance
Underneath the White Balance Adjustment heading, click the drop-down menu and select Colour Temperature. A slider will appear, enabling you to manually remove the colour cast from the image by pushing it to the left until it reads 4800K. This reduces the colour temperature to a warmer tone, subtracting the green cast and changing it to a more neutral yellow.

3. Pick a Picture Style
You’ve now lost some of the nice green tones in the photo, however, and overall it looks a little flat. To improve this, use the Picture Style options – it’s currently set to Standard, so click the drop-down menu to change it to any one of five options. We found the Landscape option is best: it boosts the natural blue, green and brown tones, and makes the sky stand out.

4. Remove sensor spots
You can see some dark spots on the sky, caused by dust on the sensor. To remove these, click the Stamp button at the top of the interface. Choose the 100% View option, then set the Brush radius to 20 pixels. Click Select Copy Source, click in the sky close to a sensor spot, and click the dust mark to remove it. Repeat this step to remove other blemishes, sampling a different area with Select Copy Source each time.

5. Sharpen it up
Once you’re happy with the sensor spot removal, click OK. Back in the main editing window, apply some sharpening. Click 100% View to zoom into the rocks, then select Unsharp Mask from the Sharpness drop-down menu. Move the Strength slider to 3, the Fineness slider to 7, and the Threshold slider to 0 to get a good amount of sharpening, without the appearance of artefacts around fine edge details.

6. Crop the shot
Your final tweak is to improve the composition, so click the Trimming Angle button. In this new window, set the Aspect Ratio to 2:3 to maintain the original image’s dimensions, then draw over the image, placing the large rock in the bottom-right. This creates a nice ‘rule of thirds’ composition, so click OK when you think it’s right. To apply all the changes go to File> ConvertAndSave, and save it to your desktop.