The attached shot posed a problem for me regarding exposure. The bird was in strong sunlight and I metered for the white neck to try and avoid burning the whites out, but in doing so I feel I lost detail in some of the black/dark areas. In this situation, which do you meter for - the whites I take it?
Thanks. :)
Great Crested Grebe
Canon 20D. 500mm with 1.4x converter. f5.6 @ 1/800. ISO 200
Hi Steve - everythings a trade off - generally speaking, I beleive you would try to preserve the details in the whites (in camera) and posssibly try then to open up the darks a bit in P.S.
The better option is to shoot in softer light and then the issues gets a bit easier.
Lance makes a good point about choosing your light. I take a different approach. I shoot RAW, not JPG. And I deliberately overexpose by 1/3 to 2/3 of a stop (based on my in-camera histogram). This gives me more detail in the blacks. Then in Lightroom, I can easily recover the seemingly blown whites while preserving the black detail.
When I read the first post, I'm relieved to say that I came up with the same conclusion Doug did - and I'll add to it with info from a seminar that I took that sensor samples more bright pixels than dark pixels. Therefore, if you have to choose between recovering dark or recovering light, in digital photography, you will have more information to work with if you err on the side of over-exposure, preserving the detail in the shadows, and recovering the highlights....
Hi - Somewhat agree - although as I said its all a trade off - underexpose and you will introduce noise when you try and open up the shadows, Overexpose by TOO much and you cannot recover the details.
Doug I definetly think the way you do it is perfect for your skill level (Hugely excellent), but IMHO a lot of us here in ETL - if we tried to do it your way would end up with highlighs that could not be recovered because they are overexposed byy TOO much to enable this.
But in the end neither is right or wrong - just whats comfortable for yourself and as long as you have fun doing it - WHO CARES.
With images having a high dinamic range you will be unable to capture the entire range. We all deveolpp our own way of coping. The idea of opening up shadows in photoshop is intersting but can lead to noise but the good part is that you will probably be using a low ISO and can get away with it.
Doug's idea of overexposing is dangerous and you need to know exactly what you are doing. If you meter porperly and chekc the histogram carefully it will work like a charm but will take experience. Using RAW as Doug mentioned is a necessity. One ohter thing you can do if yoiu try this approach is setting your histogram to sRBG for safety. The range is less than RBG so you will blow the whites sooner and know what is going on.
When working on the RAW image you might be able to use a layer mulitiplying techinque for obtaining deatil in the whties. One thing to remember if you blow the withes (oeverexpose) and the information is not reocrded there is no way to bring anything back. It will be pure white with no recourse other than cloning information into the area.
btw metering wise I don't think you could meter on the whties accuratley? Even on spot meter the area will be reading a lot more whtie than it should and giving you an incorrect reading. Would stick to your multi pattern or incicident if you know how to use it.
Blacks or Whites?
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