Last Friday while shooting on the street at night, I grabbed a pic of the
Birmingham theater marquis. Right off the bat I could see it was a problem. The
billboard part of the marquis was extremely bright while the colored lights
were quite dim. Of course the unlit parts of the building and marquis were in
deep night shadow with only a touch of illumination from the street lights and
marquis lights. Overall, it was at least ten stops variation. For capture I
shot RAW overexposing the highlights by about a 1 1/2 stops. Normally, I bring
the highlights within range, but I knew I'd lose a lot of shadow if I did that.
The RAW converter can recover some highlight detail, so I was counting on that.
When converting, I pulled the exposure back down about a stop and turned the
brightness all the way up. I also decreased the shadow depth. I'm at work now,
but I can get the exact numbers later if someone is interested. Finally, after
conversion, I used the shadow/highlight tool to ligh!
ten the shadows a bit more, tame the highlights and increase midrange
contrast. I sharpened after conversion with USM. I'm quite pleased with the
result. It's here:
http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=3421449
