When using the contrast and brightness button you'll decrease the dynamic range. You''l loose information from the file. Use levels instead. Jens
pnstenquist Fri, 03 Jun 2005 07:06:46 -0700 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
