Canon EOS mag

Technique Digital Photo Professional

The Quick Check window

DPP image preferences

Rating and Check marks It’s up to you how you use the Ratings and Check marks. There is no set way of doing it. Some photographers rate their images on scale of one to five, with five being the best. Others may use basis that an image is either good enough to process or it isn’t. If you prefer to work this way you can assign a Check mark to images you intend to work on, and leave others alone. Here’s a system that works for me. I assign a Check mark to any image that I feel is worth processing – that weeds out the weaker images. Then a simpler system, and work on the process – a rating of one star. Then I sort by rating, and look at the strongest images together. I remove the rating from any images that I change my mind about processing. The idea behind editing is to narrow your images down from the ones you took to the ones that are worth processing. The end figure depends exactly on what you were shooting and how many good images you took on the day, but my aim is to narrow the initial selection down to the best. I use the Rating and Check mark system to help me. There are many other uses for the marks – perhaps to indicate images that have been published or those that are weak, but you want to keep. The marks are there to use as you wish. I sort the images according to the Check mark and look through the selected images again. I give the strongest images – the ones that I definitely want to

Sorting

There is a sort option which works with image data. Go to the ‘View’ menu and select ‘Sort’. You can sort by: Rating ascending or descending order File name alphabetical order Shooting date/time Useful if there are photos from more than one camera in a single folder as the images from each camera will have different file numbers and the order won’t match the shooting sequence. Raw priority Displays raw files first if there are also JPEG or TIFF files in the folder. Check Mark Displays photos with a specific Check mark first. Other Check marked images are then displayed in numerical order, followed by images without Check marks.

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AF point Another useful feature is revealed when you tick the AF point box. A map of your camera’s autofocus points is displayed on the photo, with the active autofocus point (or points) coloured red. This indicates which autofocus point (or points) you used when the photo was taken. However, if you used autofocus lock and recomposed, it doesn’t indicate where the camera focused. Sorting images The Quick Check window gives you two ways to organise your images. The first is to assign the image a Check mark. You can choose from five Check marks (values one to five) or press the Clear button to remove one. The other option is assign a Rating to the image. There are five Ratings to choose from (values one to five). Alternatively, if you don’t like an image (perhaps it is out of focus or the exposure is completely wrong) you can press the Reject button. If you assigned a Rating to your images when you played them back on your camera, DPP will recognise that and display the rating – just one of the ways in which the camera and the software work together. The Rating and Check mark (or the word Reject) are displayed around the thumbnail when you return to the Main window. You can also change the Check mark or Rating within the Main window – they are displayed above the thumbnails.

The Quick Check window is where DPP really comes into its own as a piece of software for viewing and sorting your photos. So far, we’ve just looked at different ways to display thumbnails. This is useful, but to really evaluate your images you need to see them at full size on your computer screen. The Quick Check window helps you to do this. Start by selecting the image or images you want to view (use the Select all button to view all the images in the folder) and clicking the Quick check button at the top of the Main window. DPP displays the entire image on the screen. You can navigate through the selected images using the Previous and Next buttons. This lets you look through the selected images and add Check marks or Ratings, if you wish, to help sort them. Use the Rotate left or Rotate left buttons if you need to change the orientation of the displayed image. If you want to see the image in more detail, click the 50% view button. You can now examine the image for critical factors such as focus, sharpness and detail. If you need to, you can also click the Full screen button to make full use of your monitor’s screen space. Come out of the full screen view by pressing the Escape key on your keyboard and the 50% view by clicking the 50% view button again. Image information Click ‘Image information’ to see the same EXIF window that comes up when you press the ‘Info’ button in the Main window.

Like many programs, you can modify the settings so that DPP works in a way that suits you. You do this by opening the Preferences window (Tools > Preferences on a PC or Digital Photo Professional > Preferences on a Mac). There are two tabs in the Preferences window that are useful to us when it comes to viewing files. Settings for viewing raw files It can take DPP a while to render an image generated from a raw file on the screen. This is more noticeable if you have a camera with a large megapixel count or if you are using an older computer. To speed up DPP go to the Viewing and

Reproduced from EOS magazine January-March 2013 45 order box under Sort order in main window. It’s a good idea to check this box so that the order in which photos are displayed in the Main window are retained when you leave the folder (or close down DPP) and then return to it. If the box is unchecked the sort order returns to the default of sorting by file name. saving raw images setting. If running speed isn’t an issue, select High quality and uncheck the View images at high speed box. This will give you the best possible quality screen image. You can speed up DPP a bit by ticking the View images at high speed box. This speeds up DPP and for most images you won’t notice any difference in image quality. If DPP is still running slowly you can choose the High speed option. But you should only do this if it’s really necessary as it prevents you from using the noise reduction tool in the Edit image window. Settings for viewing JPEG files You have the option of ticking the Remove block noise and mosquito noise box to view JPEG images with some of the noise reduced. This may come in useful if you intend to save the JPEG file under a new name. In this case, the noise reduction will be applied to the new file. If you don’t want this to happen, or just want DPP to run as quickly as possible when viewing JPEG files, leave this box unchecked. View settings There are a couple of options here that may be useful. Under raw and JPEG you can tick the Display only CR2 images for CR2 and JPEG files of the same name box if you only wish to see the raw file displayed when you have both raw and JPEG versions of each photo saved in the same folder. This happens if you have selected one of the RAW+JPEG settings in the camera menu. The other useful option is the Retain sort

When you look at photos in the Main window you will see a set of buttons along the top of the screen. Folder view Click this button to hide the folder and collection lists from the main window. This gives you more space to view thumbnails, maximising the use of screen space. Info Brings up a window containing shooting data and metadata for the selected image. Useful for checking camera settings. The shooting information is very detailed and gives you details that you won’t find in non- Canon raw processing software such as Picture Style, dust delete data and autofocus microadjustment settings. Select all and Clear all Press these buttons to select all the images within a folder or collection, or to clear the selection. Rotate left and Rotate right Lets you rotate a selected image or images.

Above When you select an image in ‘Folder View’ and then select the ‘Quick Check’ button, this window appears. Click on ‘Check mark’ and ‘Rating’ icons – the results will appear in the top left of the image. Click the ‘AF Point’ check box to see the active point in red over the image.

Above Clicking the ‘50% view’ button enlarges the image in the frame (it is 50% of the full screen view, not 50% of the current view). The full screen view fills the computer monitor – press ‘ESC’ to get back to the normal view. These larger views are good for checking the focus.

Above EXIF data in DPP is comprehensive.

44 Reproduced from EOS magazine January-March 2013