PhotoProject :: Overexposing to the right

Something I have been continually remining myself of is, that colour quickly loses it brilliance (vibrance) as the light increases in digital images, put another way colours stay richer in the shadows. I’m not sure I have the full technical explanation of what is driving this observation yet, However today I had the opportunity to put my observation into practise.

It was very grey and overcast and a number of Rainbow Lorikeets were enjoying a good feed on the silky oak in my backyard, However they where on the dark side in the shadows and silhouetted against a grey but still bright sky. A recipe of black birds hidden in black foliage against a white sky. So I set my camera to just focus and take the exposure from a central spot and zoomed in on the birds. Immediately the sky was blow out but because my little Olympus is a mirrorless camera I could see the immediate results into my view finder and the beautiful colours of the Lorikeets was showing, Great, but these little parrots jump around a lot so I had to up the speed (and significantly up the ISO) to get them sharp and colourful. I even started to adjust the EV to +1 in this case. Being able to see what was going to happen when I pressed the shutter was amazing. Basically I was shooting to the right, shifting the shadows up into midtones albeit overexposing the sky (which doesn’t really matter pictorially in this shot).This is the Jpeg straight out of the camera (no lengthy post processing required (other than cropping and scxreen capture of the histogram).

A lesson I keep relearning

It definitely pays to check your DSLR camera setting BEFORE you go out with your camera to take some photos. I had been taken some night photo and had set the ISO to 3200. Then next day (in a hurry to get packed I grabbed the same camera. Also I don’t often chimp my photos, so it this case I had taken about a dozen photos before I realised. They all looked like this.

Because I was taking RAW+ Jpeg the RAW images do Have a bit pf coolured in the default RAW rendering. Yet such failures are a good time to experiment. Just how much off the badly over exposed image could I expect to recover with some careful postposing of the Canon CR2 RAW file?

I did try a few classic tricks with lightroom Like moving the highlight & whites sliders pretty much all thw way to the left but the image was starting to look a bit fake and badly posterized. So I decided to try prefect exposure plug in first. It did a much more natural job and the Dehaze preset seemed to recover from the highlights best. I could return to lightroom and use the whites, highlights and shadows sliders to a less extreme effect. Finally I darkened the blue of the sky by lowering the luminance of just the blue channel. Not perfect but a useable photo now (this is the bottom right photo on the over exposed strip above)

When RAW+jpeg comes in handy

There are times when shootng RAW + jpeg really pays off. I have been attempting some night photography (there was an outside chance of seeing auroa australis but it was cloudy, so nothing) and the camera was still on 1600 ISO and fully open (low F stop). So when I took a photo on the beach in the bright midday sun it was not surprisingly it was burnout. Picasa tried hard to correct it but I figured it was an opportunity to see how onOne 10 handled an overexposed RAW file (a .CR2 in this case). It did reasonable well, I used the Autotone fix in the basic enhance filter and pull back the saturation slider a bit. next was the decision about where to striaghten on the vertical post of the sign or the horizon. The horizon won.