swisspace wrote:
>The Scenery does make it easier, seeing other's pictures (especially
>graham's regular update) gives inspiration. I know the camera can do the
>job, so I just have to hope one day I will be able to share what I see.
>
>
Looks pretty good to me! Minor techie issues to resolve, is all.
>I have the shots raw, but when I adjust exposure in olympus viewer, the
>whole image goes to dark, and when I try adjusting the highlight
>contrast and exposure in raw shooter it just goes all lifeless.
>
>
I don't know anything about the Oly software. I do know that the RAW
file should be able to hold virtually all the brightness range for even
shots like these. The first trick is to learn how to expose so that the
brightest tones are just up at the end of the histogram, but don't bunch
up into a high peak there. A little experimentation should find that
point easily enough.
The second point is to set contrast so that as much shadow detail is
retained as you want. Up to this point, having a properly exposed pic in
the central areas isn't very important. What you are doing is making
sure that everything is recorded. If the result is too dark overall, the
first step in post processing is to move the center point of brightness
in Levels so that the central tones are right. This compresses the
range/curve at one ends and stretches it at the other, but if done in 16
bit mode, doesn't cause any trouble. The next steps vary with user. LCE
is part of my work flow about this point. I then might use the highlight
and shadow tools in PSCS to compress the ends, like the shoulder and toe
of film, thus stretching out the midtones a bit. Our vision is most
sensitive to midtone tonal range and contrast, and doesn't mind much if
the brightest and darkest parts have their tonla range compressed some.
What does look bad is if everything turns to just one or a couple of
tones. Much the same thing can be done in Curves, but the different
tools have a very different 'feel' to them
>Moose - what did you tweak, was it just EV and if so by roughly how
>much, perhaps I am just being heavy handed.
>
>
Quite a bit more than that. Just changing overall brightness wouldn't do
any good. The lower part of the image is quite well exposed, so I
selected everything above the trees. (Sounds tedious, but once the tools
are understood, pretty quick.) I made the upper part a separate level
for convenience. All I did to the bottom was a little LCE, to give a
little more life to it.
I adjusted the upper part with Curves to increase the contrast and lower
the darker tones to reduce the very flat, washed out look of those
areas. I separately adjusted the Blue curve a little to take some of the
bluish cast out of the midtones without changing the whites. I did much
of that again to part of the unsnowy stone in the middle that still
looked washed out. By then, I had pretty much run out of what I could do
to a small, compressed, 8 bit file with blown highlights. It's still
nowhere close to what I suspect could be done from the original RAW
file, but at least the mountains and snow are in a reasonable looking
tonal relationship to each other. And the central mountain looks more
like natural rock, although the right and upper parts aren't quite there
yet.
One of those combo 81a and polarizer filters would probably have done
wonders for this scene. But if all the brightness range is captured in
16 bit output, it can all be done in the digital darkroom, too. I'm
guessing I spent between 10 and 15 minutes playing with it. It would
actually be easier and quicker with a full size, 16 bit file. If one has
several with the same characteristics, as you do here, the time to do
each one goes down quite a bit after the first one or two.
Other folks will have different approaches. There are a lot of ways to
skin a digital cat.
Moose
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