Tuesday, August 7, 2012

A Raw Save

Here is a example of what shooting in RAW can accomplish for you. I mentioned in an earlier post that there is a much larger range of correction that can be done with a raw image, so let's take a look.
The image above is a example of extreme lighting conditions. A normal bright sunny day at the zoo, but let's see what happened. Bison don't come when you call them and they don't respond to "Could you move a little to the left". They seem, at least in my experience, to not be very active even though the sign says that they can run 40 mph. I was not using a long lens so I couldn't crop tightly. The foliage and flowers upper right are in the shade and very dark. the sandy dirt lower is in bright sun and being very sandy soil is light in color and highly reflective.


While the exposure of the animal itself is mostly good, the soil behind him is sufficiently over exposed to show almost no detail. the foliage barely shows the flowers and much of it is very close to black.



The raw converter (here I used Lightroom) has six sliders that can sometimes nearly work miracles. The first is exposure which I didn't touch. The exposure is fine. Making it darker to salvage the sandy soil would have driven the subject and the foliage much too far into the dark. Likewise making the exposure lighter would have turned the soil close to pure white. The next slider is contrast. Reducing contrast helped bring out detail in the darker and lighter areas but the image looked over flattened so I reset that slider. The next group of sliders starts with Highlights. Highlights defaults to zero and has a range of + or - 100. I set it to -100. It took moving it all the way to dark to recover the bright sand on the left. Shadows has the same range and setting it to +93 brought back detail in the foliage. Slider three, controls Whites and this was another that I left at the default zero. The final adjustment is Blacks and setting it to -57 took the very darkest areas and brought them down to black or almost so giving the image a far more contrasty look while not increasing contrast in the areas that the other sliders had brought within a reasonable range.

Over all, I consider that this was not a save of bad shooting. It saved an image that could not have been made at that time with out adding many pounds of lighting equipment to the effort.

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