Lighten up!
George Cairns shows how to reveal shadow detail without blowing highlights
W
hen faced with
high-contrast lighting
scenarios, you can end
up w it h shadow det a i l
being plunged into darkness.
This occurs when the camera’s
metering mode prioritises the
e x posu re to c apt u re det a i l i n
the brighter parts of the scene.
You could manually adjust the
shutter and aperture to expose
for the shadows, but this will
result in blown highlights.
In some situations, such as
landscape photography, you
can use a graduated neutral
GHQVLW\ÀOWHUWRUHGXFHWKHintensity of the light hitting
the sensor near the top of the
f ra me. T h i s w i l l help you to
expose the landscape’s darker
areas and the sky’s brighter
highlights in a balanced way.
But not everyone has a set of
ND grads, and even if you do,
not every scene has a straight
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to be practical.
Fortunately, Capture NX-D
has all the tools you need to
edit a photo’s under-exposed
shadows to tease out hidden
detail. In fact, it’s much easier
to restore shadow detail thanit i s to c law bac k i n for mat ion i n
over-exposed highlights, so if
i n doubt, set you r c a mera to
expose for the brightest parts
of the scene.
To ma x i m i se t he a mou nt of
det a i l you have to work w it h i n
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not JPEGs. This will make it
possible for you to recover
detail without revealing JPEG
compression artefacts and
excessive colour noise. RAW
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extra menu controls, such as
the Exposure Compensation
d ropdow n i n t he E dit pa nel.WATCH
THE VIDEO
100 March 2016 Download the start image(s) at bit.ly/start-56
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Clipped
If a photograph’s
brightest highlights
are 100 per cent white,
these areas will contain
no detail. Over-exposed
highlights (or 100 per
cent black shadows)
are said to be ‘clipped’,
because the Histogram
will look like it’s been
clipped off at one end.EV
Stands for Exposure
Value, which Capture
NX-D uses to measure
f-stop adjustments
in the Exposure
Compensation
dropdown (see
walkthrough, right).