Tuesday, July 08, 2014

Extending Dynamic Range …with & without RAW

2014-07-03

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his image of a shady spot on a sunny day is the classic example of the scene that challenges the range of light intensities that can be recorded by a camera’s sensory. If you rely on your camera light meter to get the right exposure and point at the shadows and trees the sky becomes blown out, or point mainly at the sky and the shadow detail disappear into the dark gloom. That range of light is often referent to as the camera’s dynamic range. Digital sensors are improving but they still have trouble capturing the range that traditional film could and this is much less than the human eye can handle. so very often such scene will seem very flat or less rich than you remember them. So I have taken a wide set (large EV variation) of bracketed exposures in both raw and jpeg and will run through a number of ways I have found (they are not my discoveries however) to extend the “apparent” Dynamic Range of the scene, which I will post over the coming week and add links to them back here in this article.

My objective being simply to better represent how I remember seeing the scene.

Using Jpeg

Using RAW

 

This Cambridge in Colour article on Dynamic Range is a very good introduction.

In retrospect, I realise that post this series, doing one step at a time in a blog format puts the posts in reverse order (I’ll do it the other way around in the future, but you can just use the links about as a table of contents to follow my progress). Special thanks also to Jessica Hische for the wonderful Drop Caps I’ve used in this series

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