Saturday, January 07, 2017

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.

Damn... 3200 ISO!

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 CanonPrefect Exposure plug in recovery highlights 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)

_MG_9784-Recovered Highlights

No comments: