Earlier this month some friends and I got together in San Francisco, as we do every month, to share prints and talk photography. One friend shared prints of some beautiful night photographs he had made of a San Francisco subject. As we looked for little things that could make excellent prints even better we got to talking about highlights and how to control them. There are quite a few ways to do this, and I drew a little picture on a napkin to illustrate one technique I sometimes use to get a bit more detail out of areas that appear to be nearly pure white. The drawing looked a lot like the following.
It doesn’t look like much here, but trust me when I say that it made sense at the time. My friend picked up the napkin and took it with him as a reminder… and then a few days later contacted me to say he had lost the “napkin notes” from our conversation. He asked if I would mind describing the technique again. I said I’d do it — and three weeks later I finally got around to writing it up in this article!
Photographers using digital cameras have to watch out for over-exposing highlights. While we can recover a lot of detail from dark shadows, especially with current digital cameras, there is much less headroom at the bright end of the spectrum. When the exposure is too bright it is easy to end up with lost details in high luminosity areas. Go a little too far and you end up with that bane of digital photography, blown highlights, where the bright areas are simply pure white, leaving little or no hope of recovering the lost details. Continue reading Controlling Highlights (A Napkin Drawing)→
(Minor updates to this article were made in February 2019.)
Sharpening is a very important step for optimizing digital photograph files. If you let your camera save images in the common .jpg format (a compressed image format that is often used on the web) the camera is applying sharpening to the image produced by the camera sensor. If you use the raw format (a high quality format that retains the original sensor data of the exposure) you will find that the photograph looks soft until you apply sharpening during the post production phase.
Sharpening optimizes the visibility of details that are already in your photograph. It is a matter of more clearly revealing what is in the photograph than a matter of creating detail where there was none. Most sharpening works by increasing the contrast between light and dark areas in the image — what we call sharpening as actually more about adjusting the relative brightness of adjacent portions of the photograph.
The image above is an example of a small section of a photograph.[1] It is a “100% magnification crop” of a tiny area from a much larger photograph made with a high megapixel DSLR camera. A “100% magnification crop” is an image displayed so that each pixel — or individual picture element — of the original photograph is displayed using a single pixel on the screen. (Things are a bit more complicated than that when using modern high-resolution monitors, though I’ll let that description stand for now.) 100% magnification crops let us look very closely at what is going on in photographas “at the pixel level.” In this case, the full original image from which these small examples were extracted would be equivalent to prints at a width of roughly 10-12 feet.
The right side of the example shows this tiny section of the photograph before sharpening. The left side shows the results of fairly typical sharpening. Continue reading Sharpening Basics: A Primer→
I just was alerted that B&H has a 24 hour-only$50 off on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 sale. It is available for both Mac and Windows. If you have been waiting, this might be a good opportunity to act!
NOTE: There was a problem with this link when I first posted it, but it should work now.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
(Corrections – two expiration dates were inaccurate in the original version of this post and have now been corrected.)
Right now – and apparently only for today and perhaps tomorrow* – you can purchaseAdobe Photoshop CS6 and Photoshop Lightroom 4 together for $389.90from site sponsor B&H Photo. That is a tremendous price for the current versions both programs, and if you have been holding off on getting them, this is probably something you want to take advantage of. The bundle includes a couple of free Scott Kelby training DVDs on the two programs. This pricing apparently ends on Friday, August 31, 2012. (Update 8/31: A reader reports that the prices on the Adobe Photoshop bundles returned to the pre-sale levels today, August 31. I contacted B&H since they originally reported that it would be good through August 31. The reply: “This was our mistake [and] the Adobe promotion ended yesterday.” Hope some of you were able to take advantage of this deal while it lasted!)
The current Canon ‘Instant Rebates’ on lenses and speedlites will expire on September 1 29, 2012 . See the Deals page August 23 entry for a complete list with links to eligible products. (Note that B&H is often closed on Saturday, so if you plan to purchase from them, the effective expiration is tomorrow, Friday, August 31!)
