Why I shoot in RAW!
This is a shot of a bridge that I shot on assignment in Chemung, NY. This post will illustrate the dynamic range that a RAW file has. All three photos are from the same shot/file. The top left is the jpeg straight from the camera. The top right is a jpeg from the RAW file after under exposing it by 4 stops in Photoshop Bridge. I did this to try to get some blue/cloud detail in the sky. Blown out skies look terrible. The third shot is a merge of the top left, and top right, which maintains most of the -4 exposure sky, and has the great detail of the ground from the regular jpeg. I used this method again to merge the two. When painting in the sky I used about a 32% opacity so the light in the sky wasn't totally (4 stops) different from the ground. That day was a total overcast day, so I'm excited that I found any blue in the sky :)
2 comments:
RAW works in a crunch for a high contrast image like this. Or, HDR bracket series. Either of these two methods cost postprocessing time.
A better approach is to use something like this:
http://photonotes.org/cgi-bin/entry.pl?id=Graduatedneutraldensityfilter
but I have yet to try one. I'll blog about it when I do ;)
ms
Yeah, I've tried HDR but never liked the results. I'm assuming I'm not doing it right or something. A graduated ND filter has always been in the back of my head but I've never gotten around to getting one.
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