How to keep digital from blowing highlights vs. film

[bill_tuthill]

Three recent DSLRs compared to Fuji EXR:

<img src="http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/NikonD5000/Samples/DR/Compared.png">

<img src="http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/FujifilmF200EXR/Images/Drange.png">

[model mayhem gallery]

<p>I think what you are doing is excellent way to take great digital photos. I went through this same exercise when I converted from Canon 7NE to Canon 5D Mark II. </p>

<p>I used my film camera photos to create a custom "Picture Style" in my camera which I call Film.<br>

http://www.usa.canon.com/content/picturestyle/viewers/index.html<br>

I can get very close by increasing sharpness and saturation in camera settings.<br>

However, when I shoot RAW, I use "Alien Skin - Exposure" best plug in I have ever used to give digital images that missing depth found in fine grain film.</p>

<p> </p>

[john_tran14]

<blockquote>

<p>I think this is a fair comparison</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>It's not a fair comparison at all:<br>

1. The two pictures are composed differently, taken under different lighting, and likely handheld with different shaking<br>

2. The lenses are totally different (you think the quality of the lenses are not important?)<br>

3. The sensor size is also much different than the film size<br>

4. Both can be a lot better by another photographer</p>

[mauro_franic]

<p>Dynamic range is a limitation of digital cameras not the photographer's. <br>

With a digital cameras you may use the histogram and decide to deliberately under expose the picture to preserve the highlights but that's all.</p>

[danielleetaylor]

<p>You simply over exposed the digital shot. Even the film shot looks a bit overexposed. Digital would have had no problem with that scene properly exposed. For all the hand wringing over digital sensors vs. color negative film, the vast majority of complaints I see of this nature boil down to incorrect exposure on the photographer's part.</p>

<p>1) Don't rely on AE patterns and modes in contrasty situations. They can fail and blow out even the best negative films. Spot meter highlight detail and, for digital, place it 2-3 stops (depending on camera model) above middle gray. Or use your image review and histograms to verify that your exposure is to the right without clipping any highlights.</p>

<p>2) Shoot RAW and take advantage of the features in modern RAW processors to lift shadows, tame highlights, and shape the tonal curve. ACR is amazing at both highlight and shadow recovery. The clarity, vibrance, and saturation sliders, along with proper color temperature settings, will also take care of your color complaint. (Note that a scene doesn't always call for clinical, "perfect" white balance. Sometimes we like the colors rendered on film because film's color temperature was mismatched to the scene. Play with the color temperature settings, don't just accept what your camera gives you.)</p>

<p>3) For situations which simply exceed the DR of your camera by a wide margin, bracket exposures and blend them in post. You can even do this hand held by using AEB and your fastest shooting speed, which typical yields images close enough that they are easy to align later.</p>

<p>For all the complaints about digital, I feel better able to handle harsh exposure situations today than ever before. There's no guessing about the right exposure or the need to bracket for exposure blending or HDR thanks to preview and histograms. RAW processors and Photoshop let one match the tonal curve to the conditions in the scene and produce a much more pleasing color print than was often possible with color film. And both exposure blending and HDR are cheap and easy to do.</p>

[bill_tuthill]

<p>"Bracket exposures and blend them in post."<br>

<img src="http://paulstamatiou.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/pstam_HDR_movement_ghosting_photomatix.jpg"></p>

[steve m smith]

<p>Perfect!</p>

[j_marrs]

<p>Thank you, & I will play around with the histograms in the digital cameras and see if that solves some of the blown highlight problems...... Again, disregard what I uploaded, as both images lost a lot of resolution....I down sized them too much in photoshop so niether one is a true representation of the originals...... Had to use 400speed film that day cuase wind was blowing on the island.........Couldn't use Velvia that day. Mainly wanting to see how digital photographers deal with blown highlight issue.</p>

[randall_pukalo]

<p>Difficulty handling highlights is perhaps digitals greatest weakness. I have both a first generation dslr (minolta 7D) and a recent high end Point and Shoot (panasonix/Leica fx-150). Although the FX-150 is a bit better with this as it has "Intelligent Exposure" mode which under exposes then boosts the shadows, they both blow highlights easier than any slide film ever made. Many people will say digital is like slide film as far as exposure and blown highlights. I think most who say this now, have never tried slide film, they have only heard the stories from the days before good built in camera meters. For if they had tried slide in a modern camera with even a semi decent meter, they would see how much better it holds highlights than jpeg digital. Yes, RAW is better and solves a lot of these issues, but it involves lost of post processing time too.<br>

I hope in a few years HDR technology will evolve and be incorporated into digital cameras, particularly the point and shoots, and this issue will be resolved.</p>

[dan_south]

<blockquote>

<p>I think this is a fair comparison.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Yes, but between two poorly exposed images. How did you meter this scene? Spot meter? Incident meter? Gray card? Histogram and blinking highlights displays? Or the let-the-camera-do-it-and-hope-for-the-best method?</p>

<p>There are three general categories of recording media for still images: digital sensors, negative (print) film. and positive (slide) film. Each has its merits, but each one has to be metered in a particular way in order to maximize image quality and avoid the inherent weaknesses of each medium. Your camera's meter is very capable of making a mistake, as you see here. You may have to override in some (if not most) cases if you want to capture well-exposed images consistently.</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>Mainly wanting to see how digital photographers deal with blown highlight issue.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>We let the camera tell us when we're pushing it beyond its limits and we make adjustments.</p>

[bill_tuthill]

Randall (or anyone) do you think slide film got better at highlight rendition over the years? Maybe it was just scanning that allowed us to see the highlights, versus a slide projector.

[danielleetaylor]

<p>In my experience slide film does not have better highlight range than a DSLR, and I shot a lot of slide film before getting my first DSLR. The one aspect in which slide film could be better than early DSLRs was in how it transitioned to white, or to an area where a color was blown out. Early DSLRs could produce harsh clipping and odd color transitions in these cases. It was probably more of a software issue than a sensor issue because different RAW processors had more or less of a problem here, suggesting that in JPEGs the issue was the camera's internal converter. I recall using Capture One a lot but switching to DPP when I had shots with blown channels for this reason. (I now use ACR.)</p>

<p>Modern DSLRs, or at least the ones I have experience with, are much better at this, as are modern RAW processors. I have yet to see the problem with my 7D, either in JPEG or using ACR. I would, without question, place my 7D's DR and ability to handle highlights above that of any slide film. Actually, I would place it above the ability of a few print films to. (Not all print films have 14 stop DR.)</p>

<p>The only situation I'm running into where I must exposure blend with my 7D is when shooting wide angle landscapes that contain a bright sky and a relatively dim foreground. With everything else as long as I nail my exposure (not too hard), the 7D can handle the scene. Surfing is a very challenging subject in terms of DR because of black wetsuits and white foam in the water, yet my 7D has no trouble even in JPEG, so long as I set the exposure. (Meters are too twitchy and keep trying to guess which extreme is "the subject." Luckily the light changes very slowly over the course of the day so it's easy to dial in and keep the best exposure.)</p>

<p>I'll reiterate that most of the time I see complaints about digital highlights they come down to photographer error. In film days if you got a muddy print back from the lab, you blamed yourself for the underexposure. I don't understand why today the knee jerk reaction is to blame the sensor for clipped highlights caused by overexposure.</p>

[bill_tuthill]

Daniel, what you say sounds convincing, but it is not borne out by experience. Here is a crop from a picture sent by a friend taken by his Rebel T1i (500D). It was already downsampled about 50% but this is a crop starting at 8x8 boundaries with JPEG quality unchanged. The amount of color fringing is surprising considering it is from near center of the frame, but that's the 18-55 IS for you. I would judge highlight detail as awful. Canon's JPEG engine just gave up for the lower section of tree leaves against bright sky, rendering it pure white.<div></div>

[swilson]

<p>Bill,<br>

No one has said that you can't blow out a hightlight with w digital camera, what we have said is the tools are in place to make it pretty easy to avoid.</p>

[swilson]

<p>Bill,<br>

One does not have to look very far to see blown highlights from film, not even slide film but print film.<br>

<a href="../photo/321656&size=lg">Blown hightlights.</a><br>

But of course the fact that I found an film image with blown highlight does not mean film has problems with blown highlights, not any more then seeing some digital image with blown highlights.</p>

[Ed_Ingold]

<p>There are highlights and there are highlights. If you wish to keep detail in highlights, you have to expose so they are no more than about two stops over whatever their spot reading would be. That's true for both digital and reversal film. Negative film can go about 4 stops over before the color starts to shift badly.</p>

<p>The other kind of highlight - the disk of the noontime sun, specular highlights on metal or water, and such - you don't need to keep detail. Just don't overexpose so much that flare or diffusion bleeds into other areas.</p>

<p>IMO, both of the OP's images, film and digital, are badly overexposed. This is clearly seen in the histogram of both images, and is probably at least one stop. How this was done in two separate instances escapes me. The large area of bright stone would cause most cameras to stop down. Not only is the shore overexposed, but the sea and sky too. Not even the scanner was allowed to compensate. If anything, DSLRs are rightly accused of being conservative when it comes to highlights. Oh well, nothing's foolproof.</p>

<p>I didn't do anything to compensate this image taken with a D2x about three years ago, just outside Phoenix. This is how it was exposed by the camera, the histogram barely touching the white end. The shadow detail is not bad either - I left it alone because this picture is all about cholla with backlighting. It was shot using a 55/2.8 AIS Micro, which is highly resistant to flare and, of course, very sharp. I unfortunately left the color space as Prophoto RGB, which will look much duller than necessary.</p><div></div>

[bill_tuthill]

Yay! Firefox 3.6 performs color management (I think). It does not look dull. Verified, it looks absolutely terrible in Microsoft IE6. Nice image, Edward.

[danielleetaylor]

<p><em>Daniel, what you say sounds convincing, but it is not borne out by experience. </em></p>

<p>It's borne out by my experience. Your crop tells us nothing. Was the shot overexposed? Was the contrast shoved to the wall in the picture style settings? Was HTP on or off? All I have are questions, and I can't answer one of them from that crop. And why the heck didn't he shoot a scene like that in RAW?</p>

<p>Scott nailed it. Of course you can blow highlights with digital, as with film. But digital has more tools to help you avoid it.</p>

[Ed_Ingold]

<p>It's a mistake to brand digital and slide film as always subject to overexposure. They are nearly equal in this respect, but an effective exposure strategy can deal with it. There are always compromises. Digital, at least, has a much longer shadow range than slide film (comparable to negative film). Velvia, on the other hand, goes from dense black to transparent, a range of nearly 10 stops off the film, over a mere 5-6 stops range in the subject - a contrast ratio of nearly two to one.</p>

<p>The example posed by Bob has an overexposed area of bright sky in the midst of a dense, leafy canopy. Does anyone really care if the sky is overexposed, assuming that the main subject is below the canopy in the shade? Perhaps the trees should be in silhouette against the sky, if that composition makes sense. Nothing is going to get everything every time, not even negative film.</p>

<p>The surfing situation posed by Daniel might serve as a case for manual exposure. Camera exposure systems are not perfect in high (and low) contrast situations. I would think that you would want to see detail in the white foam, ignore specular reflections of the sun, and keep black suits nearly black. The starting point might simply be "sunny 16". In this situation, it makes more sense to be consistent than "right" (with the exposure constantly shifting depending on the preponderance of black vs white).</p>

<p>So how do you keep digital from blowing highlights? Get creative, use your brain, listen to advice and learn from your mistakes.</p>

[james_kennedy9]

<p>The original images posted here are overexposed, and highlights overexposed are gone forever.</p>

<p>The way I get around it, with my Nikon D90 and D300, is to use active D-lighting, a menu item, which alters the exposure setting slightly to avoid blown highhlights. Or with other digital cameras, to examine the recent photograph on the LCD to see if the histogram is pushing up against the right hand border, or to see if the highlights are blinking on the LCD.</p>

<p>On my Canon Powershort A650IS, I have installed CHDK, and have a live histogram when I half-depress the shutter button.</p>

[daniel_h_gberg]

<p>Managing a natural light only-shot like theese:<br>

http://www.folio.se/WP/SketchImagePopUp.aspx?img=1380464 - Nikon D3<br>

http://www.folio.se/WP/SketchImagePopUp.aspx?img=1380120 - Nikon D3<br>

http://www.folio.se/WP/SketchImagePopUp.aspx?img=1380730 - Nikon D3<br>

http://www.folio.se/WP/SketchImagePopUp.aspx?img=1380857 - Nikon D5000<br>

http://www.folio.se/WP/SketchImagePopUp.aspx?img=1380809 - Nikon D3<br>

http://www.folio.se/WP/SketchImagePopUp.aspx?img=1380844 - Nikon D5000<br>

- would be impossible with digital if was as bad as many say in this thread. You just have to expose for the highlights and use proper post processing.<br>

- Yes, negative film is better - thats why I bought an Epson V750 and started to shoot with my Hasselblad and Pentax 67 again. Beautiful colorrendition and dynamic range, but only if proper scanning-technique and post processing is used.<br>

If you like speed, shoot digital. If you are very sensitive to colour and hate blown highlights, you shoot film. Its a choice.</p>