On Aug 5, 2005, at 11:32 AM, Bruce Dayton wrote:
Thanks for the explanation. It makes sense. It is a bit tricky
because what I am hearing is that I should try to expose so that I
don't blow the highlights, but just barely. So in the case of this
photo, which visibly is about where I wanted it, I should have visibly
over-exposed it (but not based on histogram) and then during Raw
conversion, underexpose it. This would then give me the smoother mid
tones that are not present now. Does that sound right?
Basically, during exposure the entire histogram should have been
shifted to the right as far as possible. Then during raw conversion,
shift it back to the middle like it is now. This would result in a
much cleaner image than if I had just exposed it where I wanted it to
visibly be. Another way of putting it, perhaps.
That's pretty much it. You want to place highlight points *where you
want to retain detail* so that in a JPEG 8-bit rendering after
conversion they fall right around the 192-210 intensity value mark.
The in-camera histogram display is based on the JPEG rendered preview
image with a standard curve: when you crowd the bright end, you have
a little more wiggle room in the RAW data, but not much. Bracketing
is cheap... ;-)
In Camera RAW conversion (PSCS2 + CR v3.1), I follow the following
routine;
ACR is set to preview sharpening only...
- set whitepoint
- set the exposure adjustment (white point clipping)
- adjust the brightness, saturation, and contrast to render the
results close to the ball park without channel clipping
(gamma curve adjustments essentially)
- do RAW sharpening at 100-200% magnification
(sharpening operations can affect overall gamma curve adjustment,
but I only want to see them in preview so I can use more
sophisticated
sharpening techniques on the rendered RGB channel data)
- adjust noise filtration (rarely)
- iterate over the brightness, saturation and contrast settings to
accommodate
the sharpening effects.
- set the shadow values (black point clipping) (very rarely)
Then I render to [EMAIL PROTECTED] color and do the rest of the image
processing in Photoshop.
Godfrey
