One for the Photoshop geeks

One more wedding post, this time for the Photoshop geeks. This is about how proper exposure and RAW conversion can get you out of a tight spot.

The outdoor ceremony was in that worst of all possible light--hard and broken with blown out highlights and the deep, dark shadows of a high elevation clear sky. A lot of wedding shooters do it in jpeg. You'd be dead in the water if you tried that here. This is even a stretch for color negative--not that the negative format cannot hold the dynamic range, but you have to consider that the wedding proofs are going to be machine output, and you lose most of the capacity of the film in that bottleneck.

Before CS3, even this type of scene was beyond rescue, even in RAW. But with judicious use of the recovery and Fill Light sliders, I was able to make it look pretty good.

Here's the camera capture image, with no adjustments (click on the image for a larger view). The highlight and shadow clipping is turned on. Most of us have been trained by now to "Expose to the right," namely, overexpose to get the data to the right hand side of the histogram and bring it all over to fill in the shadow side in our RAW processing. This is wonderful for low contrast situations, and you get a rich, creamy look that way. But in sunlight, and in high contrast, you gotta pick one or the other. And it's best to salvage the highlights and not expose them over the brink.

See that ugly U-shaped histogram? In this case, I chose to sacrifice the shadows. I use auto-exposure on everything, and compensate over or under depending on how I read the light. In this case I underexposed a third of a stop. In the hard sunlight shots I was often a full stop under. I didn't want those highlights to burn out. The unprocessed image is dark and contrasty. It's what a jpg shooter would get.

The first thing I do is slide the exposure slider to the left, while holding down the Option key, to see how far I need to go to recover my highlights. I do about half the correction with Exposure, then the rest with Recovery. The Recovery slider is great for rescuing highlights, but it can take a lot of the sparkle out of an image. Use both these sliders to work with the highlights. Ignore the overall image for now. Let it go dark.

Then I use two other sliders, Fill Light and Brightness, to work with the overall look of the image. Fill Light lifts the shadows and doesn't touch the highlights. If I were a serious geek I'd know where the cut off point was, but I just do it by look and feel. If you only use the Fill Light slider, you start making images that look like bad HDR combination images. That's where the Brightness slider comes it. It slides the entire exposure to the right, but (to a point) it doesn't send the exposure off the right edge of the histogram like the equivalent Exposure adjustment would. I then adjust the Black slider to add a little contrast to the image. It's OK to clip a little.

I make these two adjustments, Fill and Brightness, in tandem, until it looks great. Then I back them both off a little. It can look too perfect, and you still want that feeling of a bright day with shadows. Just because you can fill in the shadows doesn't mean it will look right if you do (see bad HDR, above). Yes, if you look close, there's noise in those shadows. So what. The majority of these shots are going to be seen on the web, or as 4x6 proof prints. It doesn't matter.

The eagle-eyed among you are going to notice that I'm doing all of these adjustments in an impossibly narrow color space, sRGB. Why am I making things so hard for myself? If you look at the ProPhoto histogram, you say, what clipping? What problem? That's all very well and good if you're making a custom print with your archival inkjet printer, but I'm not. If I were, I'd be making a lot more fine-tuned adjustments in Photoshop proper to bring out the midtones and faces. But those are rare requirements.  Like I said before, my clients are going to see this on the web and in machine prints. Both of which are sRGB output spaces. So learn to make it hard for yourself. You can do all this in the RAW processing box.

Comments

[Beau Harbin]

Thanks Doug. Very good practical info here.

[Jeff Henderson]

Doug, Thanks for the step by step on how you adjusted your photo. It's always great to see other people's work flow. I always come away with a tip or two to try next time I'm adjusting a similar photo.

[Doug Plummer]

It took me a long time to get over my bias against underexposing a digital image. But in these contrasty situations, you pretty much have to or the sunlit skin tones turn to chalk.