Pulling out detail in whites

[Diane Miller]

I thought I'd toss up a very quick post on the most basic step in maximizing detail in light areas. It can apply to bright areas as well as "whites."

Here's a dogwood blossom shot on a cloudy day. The exposure was high enough to begin to see "blinkies" on the back of the camera. This shot looked awful on the back of the camera, with the whites showing no detail, but the image there is not accurate for color or tonalities, as they are affected by the brightness of the display. And in addition, it represents an on-the-fly JPEG and a lot more detail in bright areas can be recovered in raw processing. The histogram on the camera is accurate but of course it only represents the JPEG.

Here's a very simple example, with only two moves of the sliders in the Basic tab of Lightroom. (Adobe Camera Raw, the adjunct converter included with Photoshop, is the same.) Different images will, of course, be different, but this is a good way to start with many.

Here's the image as it came into Lightroom:



And here it is after about 5 seconds of work. Note how the lighter tones in the histogram have been stretched, revealing the wider range of tonal detail that is available in the raw file. The differences may seem subtle, and don't appear dramatic here, but I now have a good basis for further tonal enhancement in Lightroom and in Photoshop, primarily with Curves and tools such as Nik Color Efex Pro's Detail Extractor.