Tag Archives: processing

Post-processing Workflow, Software, Technique

What You Get Is Not What You See

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Recently I spent more than a week photographing in a beautiful area of the Sierra Nevada backcountry. A short walk above the spot where we camped was a magical meadow — a place filled with light, grasses still green but starting to turn golden, high elevation trees scattered around the edge of the meadows, and a deep valley separating us from alpine valleys topped by steep granite peaks and ridges with scattered snow fields. At times clouds would float by and add some interest to the blue Sierra Nevada sky.

What I saw

Here is one of several photographs I made in this meadow, with the first example being a small version of a print-ready final interpretation…

Subalpine Meadow, Forest, and Peaks
At the edge of a subalpine meadow, surrounded by forest and high peaks

Here is another version of the photograph, straight out of my raw file conversion program and before I did additional work in Photoshop…

File after raw conversion operations

I think it reflects fairly well what I saw while I stood behind the tripod as light softened by closer clouds spread across the meadow. I’m confident that anyone who had been there with me would agree.

What the camera saw

But that is not what the camera saw. Here is what my captured file looked like before I did my raw conversion post-processing…

RAW file as exposed before conversion processing

Yuck!

This SOOC (“straight out of camera”) image looks pretty bad. The sky is OK, but the meadow is dark and flat-looking, not showing the actual quality of light at all, and the forest appears to be almost completely black.

What’s up here? Am I trying to trick you and present a false version of the scene? Am I an incompetent photographer who completely blew the exposure? Am I trying to “compensate” for a bad exposure by using radical post-processing?

The answer is “none of the above.” Continue reading What You Get Is Not What You See →

Technique

Controlling Highlights (A Napkin Drawing)

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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.

Drawing on a napkin

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) →

Photograph Exposed, Technique

A Photograph Exposed: Technique and Interpretation in Post

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(“A Photograph Exposed” is a series exploring some of my photographs in greater detail.)

Island and Trees, Tuolumne River
Trees grow on a small, rocky island in the Tuolumne River, Yosemite National Park

If you follow this website you may have seen this photograph before — it is one of two that were the subjects of an earlier article (“A Photograph Exposed: One Subject, Two Compositions“) focusing on compositional decisions I made when I photographed this Sierra Nevada subject. In this companion article I want to look at the next step — going from that original exposure to the final (at least for now!) interpretation of the subject that you see above, and the how and why of post-processing the image.

For me, post-processing is as much a part of the creative process of photography as is composing and making the exposure. In fact, many of the decisions that I make at the time of exposure anticipate what I may do during the post-processing stage. These decisions recognize that the camera does not “see” the same way that we do, and that simply trying to produce an exposure that looks the exactly like the actual scene is often both hopeless and counterproductive. Continue reading A Photograph Exposed: Technique and Interpretation in Post →

Ideas

Cooking and Photography

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I just saw yet another in the unending string of exclamations, posts, articles, blatherings, and so forth concerning the false and bizarre question of whether or not it is right to “post process” or “manipulate” photographs. It is really way, way past time to let this go and to treat it as the irrelevant distraction that it is. For now I won’t go into all of the well-known reasons why this is the case, but I will share a version of what I wrote in a reply:

It is time to stop being defensive about so-called “processing” of photographs in post. It is simply a bizarre and unsupportable myth that great photographs reflect reality – fact, every photograph lies! – or are produced simply by making brilliant decisions about what to point that camera at and when. With all due respect to farmers, to suggest that great photography comes only from careful and skillful capture  is akin to suggesting that great cooking is purely the result of great farming.

© Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

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.
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