Comet Hunter
Supporting Member
Yellow flowers are in the direct sun, darker parts in the shade. Any tips on how to process? Or was this simply a poor shot from this angle/time of day?
Complicated photo to process
- Thread starter Comet Hunter
- Start date
AlanLichty
Moderator
There are times where you don't really have choices on when you can get the shot so basically just make sure you don't over expose the highlights. You did keep the highlights intact so the task at hand is to bring a bit more light selectively into the shadows. I hope you were shooting in RAW because none of what follows will help you if this as a jpeg file. Jpeg files don't have much room for adjusting high dynamic range like this.
If you are using Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop ACR I would recommend trying the Adaptive Color profile on the RAW file. This is one of Adobe's newer tricks that can help bring up the shadows/colors while keeping the highlights intact before you start fiddling with the adjustment sliders. That leaves more room for adjustments with the sliders. You can do a lot with some careful adjustments in the Highlights and Shadow/blacks adjustments. Adaptive Color doesn't always work out for all images but when it does it can be a real lifesaver.
If you are using Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop ACR I would recommend trying the Adaptive Color profile on the RAW file. This is one of Adobe's newer tricks that can help bring up the shadows/colors while keeping the highlights intact before you start fiddling with the adjustment sliders. That leaves more room for adjustments with the sliders. You can do a lot with some careful adjustments in the Highlights and Shadow/blacks adjustments. Adaptive Color doesn't always work out for all images but when it does it can be a real lifesaver.
Alan has a pretty good recipe. Another possibility is a linear profile which also helps tame highlights if they are not blown. The shadows appear to have quite a bit of room to push.
Hey Ed,
Alan has given you some good tips.
I still haven't used Linear profiles, so I am stuck doing images like this the old fashioned way. So sometimes you have to double process the raw image when it's like this. You focus on the highlights first.
So in ACR I would pull down on the highlights until the point that the blown out yellow flowers look good. If at 100% highlight recovery, they are still blown, then slide the exposure slider down to a max of -1. You get the highlights to look the best you can.
After that you go to the Shadow Recovery, and you adjust that to recover as much shadow detail as possible.
Note, the key with both the highlight and shadow recovery sliders is to stop once things stop looking natural. Usually that means the colors start turning gray, or it gets a weird tone to the image. If you get that, you know to back off.
Then in ACR choose Image Enhancement to reduce the noise that will come into an image from pushing it so much.
Then save it as a tiff.
Now load the tiff, and repeat the previous steps. If you did get the highlights looking good the first time, then leave those and just focus on the shadow details.
*** Technically this isn't Double Processing a Raw image. In reality in the old days we would take the Raw image, and process it once for the highlights and then a 2nd time for the shadows. Then with a Luminosity mask we would combine the 2 to stretch the Dynamic Range of a scene. I believe we have an Article describing that in more detail in our Article section.
******* And a too late tip. When shooting landscapes, always do what's called Expose to the Right. (ETTR) That means when you capture images, you make sure your highlights aren't blown, by making sure the histogram is to the Right side without a gap. But you don't want to Clip the highlights, so you have to watch it. Most cameras have (Nikons for sure) what was called Red Blinkies, where any area being blown out would blink red when you reviewed it on the LCD. So you want to watch for that.
If you Clip the Highlights by exposing too much and going beyond the right edge, then the darker areas will look better in an unprocessed image, like on your view finder, but the highlights will have lost detail that you can't retrieve.
In general, most cameras can Under Expose 5 stops and still recover shadow details. And you can overexpose only 1 stop and still recover the highlights. That's why you want to expose towards the highlights but not Clipping the Highlights.
Maybe too much info.
Alan has given you some good tips.
I still haven't used Linear profiles, so I am stuck doing images like this the old fashioned way. So sometimes you have to double process the raw image when it's like this. You focus on the highlights first.
So in ACR I would pull down on the highlights until the point that the blown out yellow flowers look good. If at 100% highlight recovery, they are still blown, then slide the exposure slider down to a max of -1. You get the highlights to look the best you can.
After that you go to the Shadow Recovery, and you adjust that to recover as much shadow detail as possible.
Note, the key with both the highlight and shadow recovery sliders is to stop once things stop looking natural. Usually that means the colors start turning gray, or it gets a weird tone to the image. If you get that, you know to back off.
Then in ACR choose Image Enhancement to reduce the noise that will come into an image from pushing it so much.
Then save it as a tiff.
Now load the tiff, and repeat the previous steps. If you did get the highlights looking good the first time, then leave those and just focus on the shadow details.
*** Technically this isn't Double Processing a Raw image. In reality in the old days we would take the Raw image, and process it once for the highlights and then a 2nd time for the shadows. Then with a Luminosity mask we would combine the 2 to stretch the Dynamic Range of a scene. I believe we have an Article describing that in more detail in our Article section.
******* And a too late tip. When shooting landscapes, always do what's called Expose to the Right. (ETTR) That means when you capture images, you make sure your highlights aren't blown, by making sure the histogram is to the Right side without a gap. But you don't want to Clip the highlights, so you have to watch it. Most cameras have (Nikons for sure) what was called Red Blinkies, where any area being blown out would blink red when you reviewed it on the LCD. So you want to watch for that.
If you Clip the Highlights by exposing too much and going beyond the right edge, then the darker areas will look better in an unprocessed image, like on your view finder, but the highlights will have lost detail that you can't retrieve.
In general, most cameras can Under Expose 5 stops and still recover shadow details. And you can overexpose only 1 stop and still recover the highlights. That's why you want to expose towards the highlights but not Clipping the Highlights.
Maybe too much info.
Comet Hunter
Supporting Member
Great tips,
Thank you both
Thank you both
Kyle Jones
Moderator
You don't need to save a TIFF, re-import and repeat. You can instead create a linear gradient within LR "backwards" (so the entire image is selected) and continue pushing highlights and shadows as you like.