Recovering details and exposure settings

- I recently made this picture. This is not how the image came out of the camera. When I say I made this picture, I mean from start to finish, taking the shot, doing my post-production, here was my final result. I like this picture. I'm showing it to you today because this picture has thrown me for a loop a little bit. Partly because of some aesthetic decisions that I have to make, that I had to make that I want to talk to you about, but more because of how my original exposure strategy turned out to not be right. And the reason it's not right is because I'm still thinking with exposure strategies that are about 10 years old, and in the meantime, digital cameras have changed a lot in terms of their noise response and their dynamic range ability.

This shot has taught me that I can now start thinking about certain situations very differently in terms of exposure, and I want to walk you through what happened to me here and what I've learned because I think you're going to find that maybe for certain situations, shooting is much easier than it used to be. Some of you may recognize this location. The rest of you may not. For those of you who don't, I'm not going to tell you where it is because there are too many people there already. This is the bottom of a canyon. That means it's a high dynamic range situation, that means that the range of darkest tones to lightest tones is very great.

As I was standing there, though, my eye could see detail here in these dark parts of the canyon as well as up here in the bright parts of the sky. We do not have a camera technology that can do that in a single shot. Any camera that I point at this scene is either going to have an overexposed sky or an underexposed foreground. I cannot take a single shot that will capture this full range of brightness. This is one of the difficult things about photography is reconciling what your camera can see versus what your eye sees.

I knew that while I was standing there. I recognize this as a high dynamic range situation and knew, uh oh, here's what's probably going to happen. I'm using a Matrix Metering mode in my camera, that means it's going to analyze brightness values from all over the scene, so when I take this shot, what the camera's probably going to do is meter to make sure that I preserve details in the sky. That means that the foreground is going to be really dark. And I was right. Here's what I could capture with a single shot with my Matrix Meter.

So again, I've got detail up here, but all of this is way too dark. This is how broad the dynamic range in this scene was. So, I knew that was going to happen. I didn't actually take any test shots, I could just recognize it, so I decided I'd better employ high dynamic range techniques. HDR is a term you may or may not have heard about. If you'd like to know everything about HDR, you can take a look at my HDR course, which walks you through the whole process. HDR is simply a procedure wherein you shoot the same frame multiple times with different exposures, and then use special software to combine those exposures into a finished single shot that has good detail in the bright bits and good detail in the dark bits.

So, this camera, a Fuji X-T2, has a special HDR mode that I can just throw it into right away. When I do that, it automatically shoots a bracketed set. I push the shutter button, and it takes a shot as the camera would normally meter. It takes a shot metered one stop under, and then, it takes a shot metered one stop over, and it did that, and I got these three images. This is the one that was metered one stop over. You can tell it's over because this part is overexposed, and this part is actually bright enough that you can see detail.

That's my overexposure shot. This is my underexposure shot. Wow, these details are completely gone, but look, I can see wispy little clouds up there, and this is my regular shot. Regular shot has a little more detail down here, 'cause it's a little bit brighter, and it's lost a little bit of detail up here. I took this into Lightroom, and I merged them into an HDR, and I came out with this. This is a somewhat typical HDR shot.

I've got to say that I like Lightroom and Photoshop's HDR merging, 'cause it doesn't go way over the top. Some HDR can just look too HDR-y, can look too painterly, there can be too much detail, there can be too much perfect exposure everywhere. This looks somewhat reasonable. Look at this, I've got nice detail up here in the clouds, I've got nice detail down here in the shadow areas, I've picked up a lot of color saturation throughout the image. And it looks nice, but I started to wonder, yeah, but what could I do if I just edited a single image. So, I went back to my regularly exposed shot and started to work on it.

I'm going to just do that work for you right now. Take a look at the histogram over here. I've got a ton of data down here in the shadows and a ton of data up here in the highlights and nothing in the middle. It's a kind of astonishing histogram, actually. And if I look in my image over here, I see I've got lots of shadow, lots of highlights, no midtones. This is a portrait, skin tone is midtone. I need data up in here in the middle, so in Lightroom that means I'm going to take my exposure slider. Watch the histogram as I mouse over the exposure slider, the middle lights up.

The exposure slider is about the middle tone data in your image. It's how I get information up there. So, I'm going to brighten this. A-ha, now I've got all this nice detail down here in the foreground, but boy, my sky has gone completely nuts. I can fix that. I may have to bring my exposure slider back down, but I'm going to start by taking my highlight slider and pulling it down, a-ha, there we go, there's my sky, it's back. Now, the sky actually has some white in it, so I would like to be sure that the brightest data in my image, this stuff over here, is actually touching the right side.

So, I'm going to slide my white slider over to the right. That puts my whites where they need to be, but my highlight slider has brought the other bright tones down so that they're visible. Right away, I've got what's turning into an extremely usable image. I've lost some contrast down here. I'm going to pull the blacks over to the left to be sure that the blackest stuff is really bright. I'm going to stretch my shadow slider back over to the right. By moving the shadows to the right and the blacks to the left, I'm increasing contrast in the shadow tones of the image.

Conversely, by moving the highlights to the left and the whites to the right, I'm increasing contrast up here. So, I've stretched these tones apart to get more highlight contrast. I've stretched these tones apart to get more midtone contrast. Now, I've got all this stuff in the middle that could use a little bit more contrast. I can target that just with the contrast slider. And now, this is looking pretty good. I think maybe brightening this shadow detail up a little bit. I've lost a little bit up here, see how I'm getting a spike over here. That means I can pull my highlights down a little bit further, and bang, I've got my data back there.

This is where I ended up with more or less, working off of this single image versus what I got out of the HDR processor. Go back and forth again. Actually, I can just throw these up side by side for you here. There's still some difference. The HDR has brightened things up a little bit more down here. It's put more saturation in here. It's brightened this stuff up up here. These are subtle differences, there's not a lot, I just like this image more, the single one.

I said before one of the lessons here is an aesthetic lesson. It was interesting to me to realize that I'm not so crazy about having that much color saturation up here. I really like the quality of the water down here versus down here. As can be typical with HDR, everything in the image is very nicely brightly exposed, which has taken some depth out of the image. Leaving some shadow detail in here has left me with a more three-dimensional picture. But I could just as easily go with this image and say this is a nice picture. More to the point, wow, look what I was able to do.

Let me take this image back to its original state in Lightroom. I'm going to make a virtual copy by hitting Command, apostrophe, and then, I'm going to Command, Shift, R to reset that to its original state. This is what came out of the camera, this is what I was able to edit it into. I'm going to zoom in on this here so you can see. There's no horrible noise in here. There's maybe a tiny bit of noise under chin there. This was shot at ISO 200, at a 60th of second, so I didn't have a lot shutter speed latitude to crank the ISO up any higher, but still, I've done a tremendous amount of brightening on this image and suffering practically no noise penalty at all.

I could print this image just fine without any noise. This is what I mean when I say exposure strategy has really changed now. I've got such great noise response from this camera, I can brighten like crazy without introducing a whole bunch of noise. I've got so much dynamic range that I can pull the shadow tones around like crazy in this image and get it where I need to be. I don't need to be worrying about shooting HDR sets. There's kind of no reason not to because then I've got the HDR option and this, but this really changes the way that I'm going to approach high dynamic range scenes now.

I know that I don't have to be super worried, I don't have to be super cautious, that I've got a lot of tonality to play with in both directions. I did a good amount of highlight recovery, but more importantly, I was able to really brighten up some shadows without increasing my noise. This is something you should play with on your camera. It's not hard to find a high dynamic range situation like this. You don't have to go find whatever canyon this was. Working around buildings, tall buildings on a busy street with a bright sky, that's a high dynamic range situation. Shooting a person in front of a window, a backlit situation, is a high dynamic range situation.

Find a situation, expose to preserve your highlights, and then, pay attention to how much you can really expand your shadow details. See if you can pull your images this far. I'm shooting RAW to ensure that I've got highlight recovery if I need it. That's affording me the extra editing flexibility and kind of a safety net that I need to pull this off. This was a great time wading through this river taking pictures because I've come out of it with a radically expanded idea of just how much I can push and pull the tones from my modern digital camera images.