This is where Ian Burley, DPNow's editor and founder, shares his unique thoughts and impressions on subjects that he hopes will be of interest to others on the subjects of digital photography and other related or loosely related topics! You can follow DPNow Editor's blog on Facebook and Twitter, too.
You can recover from over exposed shots too.
Posted 29-03-12 at 05:47 PM by Ian
Tags over exposure, recovery
After yesterday's exploration of recovering from a grossly under-exposed image, how about an over-exposed one?
During a trip to the Isle of Skye in June 2011 I had a great opportunity to photograph sea eagles picking up fish on the wing. Unfortunately, I over-cooked the back-light compensation and this was the result:
I was using an Olympus E-5, a fine camera in many ways but not a class-leader for dynamic range. But I had a hunch that this shot was not entirely wasted. First, I cropped to the main subject:
Next, manipulating the RAW file in Lightroom 4 I was able to, eventually, get this result:
Here is the adjustment panel from Lightroom 4 to show you what settings I used:
While there are some areas that remain bleached out, like the top of the eagle behind its neck, and in the tail, there is a surprising amount of recovered detail. One positive thing about recovering from over-exposure is that noise is generally not a problem. I applied no noise reduction to this image at all. This supports the 'expose to the right' theory I have covered in the past.
During a trip to the Isle of Skye in June 2011 I had a great opportunity to photograph sea eagles picking up fish on the wing. Unfortunately, I over-cooked the back-light compensation and this was the result:
I was using an Olympus E-5, a fine camera in many ways but not a class-leader for dynamic range. But I had a hunch that this shot was not entirely wasted. First, I cropped to the main subject:
Next, manipulating the RAW file in Lightroom 4 I was able to, eventually, get this result:
Here is the adjustment panel from Lightroom 4 to show you what settings I used:
While there are some areas that remain bleached out, like the top of the eagle behind its neck, and in the tail, there is a surprising amount of recovered detail. One positive thing about recovering from over-exposure is that noise is generally not a problem. I applied no noise reduction to this image at all. This supports the 'expose to the right' theory I have covered in the past.
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