Photography Thailand Forum

[gregoire]

Chris, trust me.

Place the "camel hump" of your histogram as close to the right as you can without blowing highlights.

I know this from firsthand experience, not expectations. I never even read or discussed this with anyone before this thread started. What I'm seeing now is that it's also the best way to shoot according to Marc, www.luminous-landscape.com and Bruce Fraser, author of white paper "Raw Capture, Linear Gamma, and Exposure" for Adobe:

"You may be tempted to underexpose images to avoid blowing out the highlights, but if you do, you’re wasting a lot of the bits the camera can capture, and you’re running a significant risk of introducing noise in the midtones and shadows. If you underexpose in an attempt to hold highlight detail, and then find that you have to open up the shadows in the raw conversion, you have to spread those 64 levels in the darkest stop over a wider tonal range, which exaggerates noise and invites posterization."

http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/pdfs/linear_gamma.pdf

His paper says it all and in intelligible manner to boot.

[Chris Savery]

Thanks for that link. I found the article helpful to clarify some ideas. After I read most of it I realized I'd come across and saved it once before and then forgot all about it. I think it hits on some of the same points I arrived at with simple thought experiments. I don't think I've shot enough with any degree of analytic consistency and that's why I deferred the final assessment to people who do shoot day in, day out and really can say that theory or not - this is what works out to be practically speaking, the best technique.

In my photo taking, despite having a knowledge of the histogram display, I tend to rarely look at it. Sometimes I'll remember and get the idea and pop it up to see how I did but in general I tend to have my mind on a variety of other things - some that are terribly unconstructive - like, "what's that guy thinking about me taking photos here now". Also I'm pretty sure it's not just me but interpretting the histogram is not always easy. When it's a nice "camel hump" it's fairly easy to take it again and bump the compensation a notch or two, but sometimes the histogram is a mess. I'd like to have the clarity in the moment to try shooting several exposures then and select or blend them but, well, I'm still working at a level quite a bit less than ideal. Always room for improvement there. In the end I find it is subject matter which gives me the most grief and maybe it's developing my "eye" that needs the work even more so than technique. All this keeps it challenging though.

Chris :)

[David Salmanowitz]

Gregoire--Thanks for the link, enjoyed it. Bruce Fraser is a partner along with some others in Pixel Genius, which is a software company that cannot be recommended highly enough. I use their sharpening program (Photokit Capture Sharpener), and it really gives many more options and control than the built in sharpening program with Photoshop--at $99 US (or somewhere around that) I think it is a bargain in the long run. It is easily accessed thru the Automate section in PS.

[pni173]

great shot