That would work with a tripod, but not handheld. Shooting RAW, a good
exposure can be achieved with one shot.
Paul
On Jun 3, 2005, at 7:23 PM, Herb Chong wrote:
two or three exposures at different shutter speeds and blended in PS
CS 2.
Herb...
----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, June 03, 2005 9:50 AM
Subject: PESO: Dynamic Range
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
