 James McKinney |
My love/hate relationship with light. Ok, here's the scenario: It's early morning in the forest. I'm just finishing a nice warm bowl of oatmeal while sitting back and surveying my backcountry campsite for firewood. Suddenly the sun peeks over the ridge that I'm next to and sends streams of light through the trees to rest on the forest floor. The interplay of light and shadow that dapples the scene before me sends waves of joy, peace and contentment over me until....I reach for my camera. SNAP! Highlights blown. SNAP! Shadows devour the forest. SNAP! Again with the alien death rays! SNAP! SNAP! SNAP! ARGGHH! Joy: gone. Peace: gone. Contentment: gone. One of the most beautiful things to me about being in the backcountry and I can't capture it to show anyone back home why I love backpacking. Can someone please help me? James
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Tamara Lynn |
Your love/hate could be saved in Raw format. You actuall want blown highlights and shadows. If you can use your exposure comp. then you can make better pictures. What you do is set your camera on a tripod (if you can, if not then hold it on a rock,tree limb, something to keep it steady. Then shoot in Raw -2,-1, 0 +1, +2. Now you have the entire range and can layer them in PS. As long as all the details are there you're safe.
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Samuel Smith |
welcome james, if your out there you know it's a glimpse in time!you weren't ready? have your coffee one hour earlier and prepare.your out there to take pictures .oh yeah,i wasn't paying attention myself,oatmeal,at least 1\2 hour earlier. sam
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James McKinney |
Thanks for responding guys. It wasn't a question of "being ready". The light was there for awhile. Clickty, I would appreciate if you could explain the layering technique you mentioned. I have P/S Elements. Can you do it w/.jpg's or just raw files? Thanks, James
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Tamara Lynn |
Ive started out with PS 9.0 and I do it in Adobe bridge which handles raw. If shooting people you take a shot, for example in front of a sunset ( their faces are in the shade), then have them step out and shoot the sunset which is much brighter. And get your highlights and bracket slowly down. Layer them together and HDR the rest and you've got all the details at perfect exposures
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robert G. Fately |
James, first you need to understand that the human eye/brain combination is able to perceive an enormously greater range of differently lit subjects than any film or digital camera can. While your "wetware" vision system automatically compensates for the overly bright and dark areas, the camera is just a dumb machine with restricted limitations on how far the spread from brightest to darkest area can be. That bright-to dark range is called the dynamic range. So, what clickty is suggesting is essentially that you make multiple exposures of the same scene, each one exposed to capture a different brightness range. THe shots that make the sunstreams look good will probably have blacked out shadow areas with no detail, and the ones with shadow details will have uselessly overexposed sunlight streams. Now, using the layering technique clickty mentions, you would take two of those images, layer one on top of the other, and seelctively erase the sections of the upper layer that are poorly exposed, revealing the better exposed version of the counterpart layer below. HOpe that helps, BobF
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Tamara Lynn |
make sure that you use a tripod
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Kathy L. Pollick |
a lot of you guys talk about raw films. I never heard the term before I started coming here (bp). What exactly is that? And I have no clue either how to do the layering techniques you are talking about. Maybe once I get PS I can do that. I have print shop & adobe photo deluxe right now (cheap versions).
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Kerry L. Walker |
RAW is actually a digital format where the file is "unprocessed" and must be processed in the computer. The advantage is that it captures everything the sensor sees. In that sense, all film is RAW.
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Kathy L. Pollick |
Are we talking digital film? How do you process film in a computer? I guess I'm just plain cornfused.
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Kay Beausoleil |
James, blown highlights aren't always a bad thing -- see, for instance, in Better Blogs/Jim's Diary for August 28. Not too shabby!
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Kerry L. Walker |
LOL! Kathy, you are getting "cornfused" because I am not being clear. RAW digital files must be processed in the computer just like film must be processed in a lab, just like meat must be cooked in an oven. All three are RAW in that they are not ready to "eat" as is.
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Kathy L. Pollick |
Oh!!! Do you have to have a special software program to process these raw files? Are they kinda like negatives without the paper film?
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Kerry L. Walker |
You got it! RAW files are like film without the film and you do need software to process them.
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Kathy L. Pollick |
Ah ha.... {lightbulb}.... now, is there a special setting on the digital camera that takes pictures like this, or is ALL digital film considered raw, until you process it?
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robert G. Fately |
Kathy, here's the story: Any digital camera has a chip (the CCD or perhaps CMOS) that gathers the light coming through the lens and translates that into numbers (thus the appellation "digital"). This data stream is then reworked with what is essentially a special-purpose computer in the camera body to create the digital file you can retrieve. Now, originally, camera manufacturers included computer chips in the camera that did a certain amount of processing - trying to create the most usable image possible right there at the source. So, the jpeg file the camera itself saved to the memory card is actually processed, both for "best" exposure and sharpness as well as compression (to save space on the memory card). As the technology matured, and users became more savvy about digital manipulation, some manufacturers offered the option to save the so-called "raw" file. This is the digital stream that the CCD creates without any processing at all. These manufacturers then offer software (often for free) that can read their version of a raw file, for, alas, they are not all alike. Since the raw file has ALL of the data the chip could capture, it is possible to cull out more useful information than the built-in chip can inside the camera if you start with the raw file (and have the appropriate software that can read that file). So, while it's a weak analogy, folks started to think of the raw file as equivalent to film that muct also be processed (though in the analog world that means chemicals and stuff). Thus the phrases related to processing the raw file as if it's film. It's not - it's just a figure of speech. Hope that helps, Bob
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