You should never be afraid to leave midtones, moderate highlights, and moderate shadows in place. That doesn’t mean they need to be photographed that way – they could easily look good as a high-key, low-key, or high-contrast subject – but sometimes it does.
The fact is that a lot of real-world subjects sit in the midtones. But sometimes the opposite happens instead: The photographer brightens the highlights and darkens the shadows to the extreme, resulting in high contrast even if the scene demands subtlety. Unnecessarily Contracting Your Dynamic RangeĪt least as a landscape photographer, I see the “excessive shadow and highlight recovery” bug appear all the time, including in my own work if I’m not careful. Don’t un-clump them – whether via shadow recovery, HDR, or any other technique – without a good artistic or commercial reason. Frankly, a lot of images look better when they clump some tones together. Instead, the key is to avoid unnecessarily expanding the dynamic range.
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Architectural and real estate photography are some obvious examples, where you’ll often get blown highlights in all the windows otherwise (although that, too, isn’t always bad). Granted, HDR and similar techniques can be useful, even necessary, sometimes. I flattened the emotions alongside the light. It has all the highlight and shadow detail that’s missing from the original, yet it has none of the character. Here’s how that turned out, edited to eliminate all clipping: HDR version with no clipped shadows or highlights But while I was on location here, the clipping concerned me, and I took some HDR variations just in case. The photo above is not an HDR, but rather a single image that manages to clip both the highlights and especially the shadows because of the scene’s extraordinary dynamic range.
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The scene that turned me away from HDR – almost for good – was this one: NIKON D800E + 70-200mm f/4 135mm, ISO 100, 1/125, f/8.0 Don’t be afraid of a saddle-shaped histogram, nor a histogram where everything is bunched toward one side or the other. And the sun doesn’t need to be darkened into a yellow disk in the middle of the day. Silhouetted trees don’t need +100 shadow recovery that shows every detail in the bark. In short, it’s ok to process your photos to retain their tones from the real world. Whereas the second of the two histograms is from a photo you may have seen before called Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico. How many centuries did painters long for the most brilliant highlights and darkest shadows and spend fortunes on paints to achieve them? No doubt they would laugh at photographers, who seem to be the only artists who want everything from the sun to the dark foreground smushed into midtones.Ĭase in point, the first of the two histograms above belongs to this perhaps-not-quite-a-masterpiece: The perfect histogram the perfect photo. In the world of art, bright whites and deep blacks can be powerful tools. Avoid at all costs.īut things aren’t really so simple. Meanwhile, the histogram below is a nightmare on a stick: Terrible histogram. It’s a nice, neat little bell curve that would make your statistics professor proud: A perfect histogram. In fact – the opinion seems to be – the histogram below is a good target for a typical scene. God forbid any 0,0,0 or 255,255,255 tones sneak in the spikes at the edges of the histogram would be sharp enough to kill us. No matter the image, they’ll recover highlights and shadows until Lightroom stops yelling at them for losing detail. The highlights aren’t allowed to be highlights, and the shadows aren’t allowed to be shadows.Įven outside of HDR photography, many photographers have an irrational fear of clipping the dynamic range. The sky is darker than the foreground, and everything floats in the image with unnatural glowing colors. Most HDR photos I see don’t need to be HDR.
Unnecessarily Expanding Your Dynamic Range But even though this capability is remarkable, it’s also easy to overuse. The days of picking between highlight detail and shadow detail are gone almost any modern camera can capture both simultaneously with ease. One of the quieter revolutions in digital image quality has been dynamic range.
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