Does Exposing to the Right make a difference?

Exposing to the right, isn’t magic and it not applicable everywhere.  Its a relative simple method (“trick” is not the right word) to help capture more light and reduce the underlying signal to noise ratio issues in lower tonal ranges. Whilst it can be applied in jpeg format, with lesser success, it really needs photos to be taken in RAW format, which records more detail and  give the capacity to adjust tones with suitable post processing software for the “finished” photo. It also helps to have a digital camera that can display a histogram (of the light illumination levels) on the back of the camera.

Just a word of warning there is a lot of rubbish written about exposing to the right that will come up early in google searches. If you read this post and try it out for yourself you will realise that it isn’t a hoax or a myth (they are just BS, Fake news)

The other requirement before you can exploit exposing to the right, is having an image with some “head room” in the histogram to increase the exposure without hitting the dreaded white clipping. Once your sensor fills with photons to its maximum, no extra detail can be captures. in 8-bit RGB terms you have reach 255 level in each colour channel. The histogram will be hard up against the right hand edge (see lower right of the examples below). If your camera has the settings you can turn on the feature to show this clipping. They are frequently displayed by blinking zones of colour usually referred to as the “blinkies”.

I took this series of photo on the way home, trying to beat a storm, the new growth on the oak trees looks photo worthy so I stopped for a quick shot. The sky was darkening and the trees largely in shadow so I got a typical result (photo above left) with what appeared to be an reasonably exposed sky and most of the foreground in deep shadow. Looking at the histogram the exposure is probably ok in terms of average illumination. There is very little  bright light recorded on the right hand side of the histogram. The photo on the left is just not what the scene looked like, it appears darker than what I saw. This is the type of situation where exposing to the right can help achieve a better image.

In my series I am using the exposure compensation to try letting in more light, but if your are shooting on a DSLR you can use any combination of ISO, F-stop or Shutter speed. Just changing f-stop by one stop doubles the light, change to +1.0 EV achieves the same. I have taken +1 Ev (the middle photo above) and +2 EV (The photo on the right above). Immediately I can see that the +2 EV option is too much I am clipping the sky and no matter how much darkening I try to perform it will remain pure white. The histogram for the center photo looks better the histogram is just touching the upper edge but now a lot of the illumination has moved to the upper right, This is what exposing to the right is trying to do. The trouble is, the photo looks overexposed, particularly in the sky.

The important next step in the exposing to the right method is to post process (the center photo) to “pull back the tones”, particularly the whites & highlights, the sky in this case. I’m using lightroom and just the basic tonal sliders. I’ve moved the exposure slider back –1 (one stop),  highlights most of all, white & shadows less and blacks hardly at all. I have moved all slider to the left, darkening the tones. Essentially I’m reversing the lightening step I deliberately took in the camera, when using the +EV compensation. Avoid pressing Auto (tone) here because it will take you photo back to essentially the same as your first exposure. Just experiment with the sliders and remember “less is more”, be gentle don’ try and over do it.

The result (shown below) better captures both the sky and the shadow detail, with the important side benefit of reducing noise in the dark tones and making the colours and mid tones a little clearer (without having to use the clarity of vibrance sliders). It is definitely closer to what I saw.

It is also worth looking at a bit of the detail

An insert from the original photo shows some noise in the shadows and flatness in the mid tone details.

Similar insert of the tonally adjusted Photo that was originally exposed to the right, showing less noise in the darks and also better detail in mid tones and slightly richer colours.

With RAW it is also possible to also lift the tonal range, (ie lighten the darks/shadows) of the original but this will only increase the obvious noise.

Exposing to the right can be a rewarding approach if your shoot in RAW, and have access to good software for post processing. Try it out next time you see a photo with the “head room” in your histogram to up the exposure (and collect more light).

Beautiful Evening Light

Went for a walk in Jells Park, to the Oaks Picnic Ground and the night was warm and balmy but the light wonderful. I made a few HDR bracketed sets but I like this one the best.

It translated into a wonderful google deep dream style interpretation as well.

ArtInspired :: The Banksia in the rain

Still thinking of the process used by artist to create an image versus how a photographer might capture that image. It has been a overcast and drizzly day but I managed to get a photograph of a banksia cone in flower. A almost good photo in itself and I had run a bracketed set (handheld) but it was windy so it was hard to merge and properly register. Rather than commit them to the reject bin it was a worthwhile starting point to reconstruct an image in the manner an artist might.

I’m just using my HP Spectre Tablet in tablet mode so I started with the original image and used the Polarr app to add a little contrast, contrast and strength to the red (both luminance and saturation, but not two much). I might have normally preformed this in lightroom and/or OneOne but they are not as touch screen aware as Polarr, which is a pretty neat photo edit app with really intuitive and easy to use basic tools that can easily be used by hand in tablet mode. An artist might start with the background and the overall colour, so I switched to Corel painter essentials and first set up what they call smart blur (which help highlight the strong compositional elements) and also refined the colour palette (I just wanted to enhance the two colours red and green, classic complimentary colours so I pulled back the saturation of any other colours). I use painter essential to do a very quick starter clone painting of the background. Unfortunately this smeared out the red so I use a soft clone brush to bring out sharper edge  of the Banksia flower (this helped later registration of the images). Next I re-ran the HDR merge using Aftershot Pro, with particular focus on getting best registration on the banksia. However the droplets of water where no longer perfect.

  

I now had three separate and subtly different images and used OnOne 10.5 layers to blend them together.  The background from the clone painting, the foliage and water droplets on the upper stamens from the original photo and the flower itself a combination (a soft blend mode) of the original photo and HDR image (mainly to enhance the colour).  With a Brush Border from OnOne Enhance

I’m not sure how to refer to this style of image. Is it digital art, a faked photo (aka photoshopped which of course it isn’t) or photomontage or something different (and new)?

“We called it photomontage because it reflected our aversion to claiming to be artists”  …Hannah Höch

Looking for Abstract Compositions in Late Afternoon Shadows

Sculptures in the (sub)Urban Landscape

Wednesday was a magnificent spring afternoon so I was out looking for an Urban Landscape photo opportunities. Thes two metal sentinals look vey happy in the stong light.

 

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Metal



 They are all Google+ Autoaewsome HDR* images, finished off with a perfect Photu Suite 9 Big Softy Vignette

Out of the shadows

Trying to get Google+ photos into blogger

Whilst I can embed google+ posts (as shown above).

It is somewhat disappointing that it is not easy to grab a simple link address for posting a photo. It is also a little distressing because the embed code doesn't actually show anything on your blogger new post page. The really distressing part is this method of embedded posting then also triggers a duplicate post back in google+, but without the image (because it is now considered two small!) The duplication doesn't end there it also adds a comments with the same text as in your post to your posts. I have an image of a disoriented animal chasing its own tail. There is a better way, but still with a bit of tail chasing.

The photo is actually a Google+ *HDR, but I will admit the afternoon did have wonderfull light.

Extending Dynamic Range …with & without RAW

 

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
Auto Tonal Fixes ETTR Exposing To The Right Bracketing, HDR & Tone Mapping	Bracketing, HDR & Tone Mapping One RAW to SDRplus & FauxHDR

 

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

PhotoFriday :: Sunshine

An AutoAwesome HDR, that nicely captures the setting winter sun.

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Sunshine

Photofriday :: Morning has Broken–Revisited

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Early Morning

 

When I took this shot last week I( was actually pleased with it tonal but not colour and the original is posted on flickr. BUT it was quiet a magical moment to be there, the sun was breaking through the low morning cloud and exposing some promising blue sky above, and the dust and sand haze was still hugging the grown and the shafts of light where casting a gold glow. So I set about reprocessing the image on two parts (layers) in Perfect Effect 8 to cool the sky and warm the shafts of light in the dust and every so carefully  applying a clarity tone adjusted to the whole. Its now much closer to what I remember, well in my minds eye.

The Benefits of Bracketing for High Contrast Subjects

The Photographic opportunities at the Alfred Nicholas Gardens was pretty amazing but the sunny autumn day produced strong contrast in the pools of coloured light in the shade of the tall trees. This definitely a situation that gives a hard time for the in camera light meter to get a viable exposure. I have learned to trust my instincts in situations like this and go for slight under exposure to avoid burning out the highlights. If you are shooting raw you will usually be able to get a bit of detail in the shadows, whereas it is hard to fix the highlights when they are burnt out. I have also learn that this is also the time to run a bracketed set. In this case I cranked up the EV steps of 1.5 and run five exposures. Just looking at the back of the camera I was able to conform that I was approximately right in my choice, The histogram starts to rise up on the right hand edge when the highlights get blown out, In lightroom this is refered to as tonal clipping and when a number of pixel beloe just white (or truely In the case of this series I selected the EV=2.0 photo to post on flickr. Just in case I did run a few more bracketing exposures are I walked around and took different views. So I have a few over and under expose images but most turned out fine.

Still Life in Light & Shadows

The Patch :: towards abstraction in colour

This months theme in the patch is abstract and the weekly sub theme is colours. Seemed like a perfect candidate to get deep into post processing,  Whilst I don’t mind refinement and some enhancing I just feel I need to rebel against overuse of “photoshop trickery” (it isn’t all done in photoshop by the way, there also are a lot of horrid “art” filters on mobile phone apps to blame as well).  Don’t get me wrong the right modification and refinement can completely alter an image and make it come alive, but maybe not for me this week. So I figured to be different I should keep the post processing minimal and go for an unusual take on something familiar. I enjoyed experimenting with shots taken without a lens and the subtle patterns and gradations of refracted light. This reminded me colour is just light. More specifically how we see certain wave lengths of light. The purest colours are there in any rainbow, just how to capture them. So I tried out a number of common reflected and translucent object with light bouncing off or passing through them. The I came upon an old CD pinned to my studio noticeboard that I had put through a shredder for a unrealized collage project and it showed wonderful rainbow refractions when lit at the right angles. So with the crinkle cut CD on the floor against the window I got out my macro/telephoto 70-300mm lens, opened up the f-stop and zoomed right in.

Late Afternoon Spring Light

The spring weather, particularly in the period from the grand final until the Melbourne Cup is normally pretty special. A great time to enjoy the garden and wonderful lighting for keen photographers. This year the weather have been fluctuating been cold wintry days and hot almost summer patches. Today however it was near perfect,

PhotoProject :: Shadows

Often the power of light is more strongly captured in the shadows

Photofriday :: Artifical Light

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Artifical Light

Late Afternoon Visitors

What happened to the Aperture Ring?

My first SLR camera was a Pentax Spotmatic, which was a pretty revolutionary camera at the time, I got mine in 1969, because it had a built in lightmeter. You set the aperture with the lens ring and then you could rotate the shutter speed dial until the arm on the lightmeter visible on the right hand side of the through the lens viewfinder, was centered. If the speeds where too slow or two fast you could adjust the apeture ring. It was very easy to use and worked really well. I love it. A later camera body, also a Pentax,introduced me to aperture priority on a large mode dial. It allowed you to select an aperture and the camera itself choosing the shutter speed. More magic, particularly if you wanted control over depth of field.Over the past decade, or so, the separate appeture ring has disappeared off most lens. I suspect a lot of people haven’t even notice! Before we figure out what can be done without the aperture ring we should first look at -

What is Aperture?

Aperture is a measure of the size of the opening within the lens that controls the amount of light that reaches the film or sensor. It is usually given is a strange sounding unit f-stop

f-stop = focal length * diameter of opening

The strange sequence of numbers it is quoted in f/1.4 (f/2) f2,8 (f/4) f/5.6 (f8) f/11 (f/16) f/22 might make more sense when you realize that all are approximate multiples of √2(the square root of 2) and the amount of light reaching the sensor is proportional to the area of light on the sensor (ie πr²) Thus each f-stop is equivalent to doubling or halving the light. The bracketed numbers in the sequence above are the half stops.The lower F-stops let in more light and give you a faster shutter speed for your best exposure. Its as simple as that.
In most camera the size of the opening is controlled by a bit of clever mechanism, usually called the diaphragm, where a set of thin blades are pivoted, connected around the a ring shape and sprung in such a way that as the ring is rotated the blades expose a larger or smaller gap in the center.  This was the reason why the aperture control was on the lens (just at or behind the convergence point of the lens, Today most DSLR lenses have the same style of blade diaphragm but the control for setting the diaphragm opening is on the camera body, perhaps in a menu, perhaps as a separate wheel or disc. So you should find you are able to control the aperture setting even if your lens doesn’t have a ring to adjust it.
The Aperture setting is also one of the main factors in determining depth of field. the smaller the opening through which the light passes the greater the range of objects in your scene that will be crisply in focus on the sensor. This is why many camerphones with tiny lenses seem to have almost infinite focus. Whereas the larger openings (lower f-stop) will reduce the range of focus to a narrow band. Portrait photographers often use this to blur out distraction backgrounds but have the face just in focus

Out of the Shadows

Kangaroos grazing in the late afternoon sun at the Cardinia Reserve Park picnic area.

PhotoFriday :: Primary Colour

For PhotoFriday’s topic Primary Colour

Colour is not an inherent property of the subject we choose to photograph, instead it is the colour reflected by them. Therefore our seeing, is entirely dependant on light and any artist or photographer is faced with complicated processes to reproduced that on paper or on a screen. An artist will have to carefully choose pigments and use a variety of brush strokes to imitate the reflected light. A photographer must rely on technology and that technology has traditionally had difficulty with pure colour, especially yellows. Kodak’s famous yellow Kodachrome box was a brilliant marketing ploy to say “we can reproduce pure colours without a colour bias”.

PS This is a Photo of Painted Palette with Real Brushes