Tips on Avoiding Blown Highlights 2143 60 53 +1 27 62 StumbleU share 18695321 m Read Your Histogram If you havent learned how to read your cameras histogram, theres no better time. The histogram is a physical display of the range of light captured by your camera. It will change depending on your scene, but it will typically look like a wave with several up and down points across the graph. Areas on the left show the shadows, the middle shows mid-tones, and the right shows your highlights. If you see that your “wave” is hitting the right side of the graph, it means that areas of your photo are overexposed, or blown out. The light recorded for those certain settings is too bright to record detail in the certain areas. To fix this, simply adjust your camera settings so that your exposure is darker. When the “wave” has moved from the right side of the graph and is no longer touching it, then you no longer have any blown out areas. Highlight Blink Mode This mode is super handy for quickly checking overexposed areas in your photos. Most cameras have the option to view your photos in “blink” mode. While viewing photos in this mode, areas that are blown out will blink, usually changing from black to white. This can help you find what areas are too bright and if you need to adjust your exposure to fix it. Note that just because there are blinking areas in your photo it doesnt mean you have to capture the scene until the blinking parts are gone. For instance, if youre shooting a car with its headlights on, they may blink in the review, but the rest of the photo may be properly exposed, and it may be unnecessary to change the exposure. Canon Rebel T4i | Nikon D7100 | Nikon D800 | Canon 5D Mark III | Nikon D5200 | Sony A99 Bracket Shots This is an extra safety for ensuring your photos are not too bright or too dark. If you dont have time to see if youve overexposed the scene or you dont have a way to tell if your highlights are too bright, you can bracket your shots. Bracketing simply means you take multiple exposures with different settings. So if youre shooting a scene, and youre not sure if its too bright or too dark, take another photo thats two stops brighter, and another thats two stops darker. Use Graduated ND Filter In many outdoor scenes, the sky is brighter than the foreground. This is a particularly common problem in landscape photography. By using a graduated ND filter, you can balance out the brightness of the scene. A graduated ND is dark at the top, but clear on the bottom and has a smooth transition in between. What this allows you to do is to reduce the amount of light coming into the camera on the top half of your scene, which is where your sky will be. This brings the contrast of the scene down so that you can capture a more realistic and manageable scene. Shoot Raw JPEG is good and all, and there are plenty of reasons to shoot it, but RAW can give you many advantages over JPEG. One of the biggest pluses is that there is a lot more wiggle room for pulling detail out of over- and underexposed areas. Of course theres still a point where an area is simply too bright, but RAW is much more lenient on these limitations.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 00:03:29 +0000
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