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Merciless shadows and blown out skies


hjoseph7

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I took my Canon 30D out for a drive last weekend on a clear sunny day and I have to say that 70% of my pictures had

some issues. Some that even Photoshop could not fix. I hate to Chimp, but not Chimping can be fatal with these digital

cameras. They have a hard time handling contrast. If you expose for the shadows the sky or background is totally devoid

of pixels. If you expose for the highlights then everything else is dark so dark that trying to lighten them up would be futile.

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<p>Hmm, open shade with bright sunlit walls and white objects. Chromes and prints wouldn't have fared much better. In my film days I used to work really hard to control contrast: wait for a cloud to cover the sun, use fill flash and/or use reflectors. If you can't do those things, shoot RAW, expose for the important HLs and pull up the shadows in post. The old way of doing it is a contrast mask but HL and shadow sliders might help as would multiple RAW conversions with EC settings for shadows, all blended to taste in PS layers.</p>

Sometimes the light’s all shining on me. Other times I can barely see.

- Robert Hunter

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<p>there's no useful information here.</p>

<p>did you shoot this raw? is the camera capable of 14 bit depth? What Photoshop techniques did you try to use?<br>

digital cameras are what they are and that's approx what slide film can give. a good technician knows the limits of the tools they're using and ways of working with them. It's much easier to dig stuff out of the shadows vs. hopeless blown highlights.</p>

<p>Have you considered fill flash?</p>

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<p>This time of year is when low light angles from the southern sun tend to make contrasty scenes even more so, or at least so it seems to me. However, I have just been looking at scans of some film shots from this time of year (late autumn, early winter) and I've had to recover the highlights and fill-in the shadows on a bunch of them to cut the stark black and white effect. Of course, I was mostly shooting with slide film, specifically KII and K25.</p>

<p>I still think that pushing the exposure a little toward the highlights and then post-processing for the shadows works best in the digital age. One thing's for sure, if you really burn out the highlights, there's nothing there to recover. Of course, totally black shadows don't fill in too well either.... :P</p>

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<p>In situations like these no in-camera jpeg will preserve the dynamic range without clipping either end. Instead consider shooting RAW and bracketing the exposure by about +/- 1 EV. That will give you room to play with.</p>

<p>When shoothing RAW, it's also worth adjusting your camera's setting as described in <a href="http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/right-hista.shtml">this article</a> to get a much more accurate histogram.</p>

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<p><em>I think film could have handled these situations allot better.</em></p>

<p>Negative film would capture more of the scene's dynamic range without clipping information from the brightest or darkest parts, but it would take very-skillful custom printing to get good-looking prints from those negatives. Even with film, you need to be conscious of the contrast in the scene and of what your meter is measuring. Loading your camera with 400-speed film, setting it to P mode, and just pointing and shooting wouldn't give you any better results.</p>

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<p>Black and white film is fun, as it has extreme dynamic range or high contrast, depending on how you use it. If the sun is bright, overexpose and under develop. If it is cloudy, underexpose and overdevelop. The real pain are partly cloudy days that alternate minute by minute :-)</p>

<p>For digital, chimping is helpful to set your exposure, but after you get that down you can stop. Turn down the contrast in the raw editor to calm the shadows.</p>

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<p>Harry, I am a bit old school but I always carry a set of ND grads. In the top photo a carefully positioned Grad on the RHS would help and in the lower shot a grad covering the top (awnings and sky) would help. In both cases the Grad will not completely solve the problem without creating other issues but you should be OK with a 1 stop (and possibly even a 2 stop) grad</p>
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<p>Harry, I believe you indicated that you are shooting Jpeg and that is where you need to start to fix the problem. I have the 1dsmkIII and shot both raw and jpegs for a test I was doing. The raws were all fine and the jpegs did not handle many things very well. I shoot in contrasty light all the time and have few problems. I don't chimp, but I do look when I recognize tough light situations and based on the info I get, can make the needed adjustments to get the proper exposure (one that will process out as needed)</p>

<p>Shoot Raw!</p>

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<p>Harry,</p>

<p>Your first shot is just too bad to adjust. Your second can be saved with a little bit of PS. </p>

<p>You need to shoot RAW under these conditions and chimp your first few shots to check your exposure.</p>

<p>Also your really need to have your sensor cleaned. I mean really.</p><div>00UyFA-188981684.jpg.97030c00ea1e4c598fef195ad134500a.jpg</div>

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<p>On a side note, totally unrelated:<br>

You might want to clean/blow your sensor. The second shot has dust all over that sky...<br>

Marc's fix with the saturation totally makes that sensor dust just pop out.</p>

<p>Unless it's just some birds off in the distance?</p>

<p> </p>

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<p>This is a problem that I constantly deal with in high contrast scenes. I simply underexpose a bit and push in post, then apply some lighter noise reduction to help with the noise in the shadows. Who knows when digital will be able to resolve this issue with sensors that have a wider dynamic range.</p>
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<p>Sunny-day shooting is often a frustrating experience as the range of tones is often way too much for the medium to handle, digital or film. Unless you learn how to use fill-flash (pretty easy with some of the newer flash units), you'll always get these types of files.</p>

<p>A polarizer might have helped a bit.</p>

<p>When you out for drives, relax and enjoy the scenery.</p>

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<p>Ha! Posts like these make me enjoy shooting B&W film in my Olympus OM-1 even more. For example, this image was shot in the same conditions, 5 stops difference between the shadows and the highlights. No problem, full detail retained in both:<br>

<img src="http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs51/f/2009/313/0/f/Bridges_to_the_Market_by_philosomatographer.jpg" alt="" width="620" height="900" /><br>

<em>(5x7in chemical print, Ilford MG IV satin paper, print scanned with Epson V700)</em><br>

Still, if you ignore my pro-film rant, I used to shoot 1D/Ds MkII Canon pro bodies, and it really had quite incredible highlight latitude, <strong>if you shoot RAW </strong>and process with a good RAW processor. Still nowhere near B&W film, for example with this shot, though I could recover a lot of the shadows, there was no way to recover this sky, but admittedly it was straight into the sun. <em>(EOS 1D MkIIn @ ISO100, 28-300L, f/22)</em><br>

<img src="http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs19/f/2007/249/4/c/Sepia_Blues_by_philosomatographer.jpg" alt="" width="598" height="899" /><br>

For the original poster's image at the top, I would have underexposed by about a stop more, and seriously pushed up the shadows, even though they would have been very noisy.</p>

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<p>Indraneel, beautiful image, but I am calling foul on your statement that it was "underexposed by 4 stops". To my knowledge, you are using a camera which does not allow a -4 exposure compensation setting, nor does it have the necessary display in the viewfinder to even indicate that a show is 4 stops underexposed.<br>

So that leaves us to examine the actual lighting condition and exposure. Your EXIF data indicates manual mode, and ISO100, 1/125s, f/11. Your claim of four stops underexposure would require your subject to be sitting in deep shade (i.e. around EV10), i.e. one stop less than typical open shade (EV11). From the lighting in this image, and the fact that she casts a shadow on the table, this is clearly not the case, in my opinion.<br>

Sorry, I will buy that you perhaps had to bring it up two stops, but not four. Also, no D200 I have seen would handle the lost colour fidelity and noise that well, no matter what the post-processing. Sorry if this post is a bit aggressive, but I just don't buy it.</p>

 

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<p>"I think film could have handled these situations allot better"</p>

<p> Depends. With slide film it is most often the case that the material can handle less brightness range than a digital sensor, not more. Indeed I've found that after fifteen years of using slide film, exposure control with digital isn't so hard, particularly when you can see right away whether you've got it right or not.</p>

<p>No matter what your medium there are scenes- sometimes lots of them- where you can't simply aim the camera set on auto and expect to get a good result. Tools like grads, fill flash, polariser if its a bright sky causing the problem, recomposition, HDR, shooting raw can all help sometimes, depending on the circumstances. But if you're not checking what you've got at the time, not aware of scene brightness relative to the capabilities of your medium, and can't bring any of the correction tools to bear, then my first thought I'm afraid is user issue not medium problem.</p>

<p>As Mike Dixon says, colour neg film has a wider dynamic range and can handle more contrast. But there is no medium available to you that beats thinking about your picture- the composition of and contrast within your first picture in particular is going to result in a poor photograph on anything IMO.</p>

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<p>The first picture seems to have more detail than the presentation is giving justice to. It's a very difficult lighting situation but with slightly less exposure and careful PP. there is a better image possible. True, digital has some dynamic range challenges but not much more so than slide film.</p>

<div>00UyMy-189111584.jpg.912f6ad36d999a5236b515647a72007f.jpg</div>

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