The Canon Magazine 41
LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY
22
Digital
solutions
Utilizing the power of
your Raw files is a good way to get the
most of your landscape shots to create
better finished images.
Raw files are capable of holding a
wider dynamic range than JPEGs, but
both the histogram and the preview
image that you see on the back of the
camera are based on a JPEG version of
the image. A Raw file contains more
information in the brighter and darker
areas, which means that you can teaseout detail that might otherwise appear
lost when you check the picture on the
rear screen of your camera.
For instance, if you develop a Raw file
in Lightroom or Photoshop’s Adobe
Camera Raw plug-in, you can apply a
digital graduated filter on the sky, use
the Shadows slider to reveal detail in
dark areas and fine-tune the Whites and
Highlights sliders to pull back detail in
clouds and other areas in danger of
being overexposed. You can also tweak
the luminosity of individual colours,
such as darkening the blues in a sky.STEP 1 Blown highlights
Straight out of the camera, the Raw file shows
the bright areas of this scene pushed up on the
right and ‘clipped’ by the edge of the graph. Not
surprising: it’s a high-contrast scene.BEFORESTEP 2 Digital grad
In Adobe Camera Raw of Lightroom, you can click
and drag a graduated filter across the sky that
enables you to selectively control the brightness
and tones in this area, using Exposure, Highlights,
Whites and Dehaze we’ve managed to darken the
sky for a more balance image.STEP 3 Brushing up
If there are parts of a scene that poke into the grad,
select the ‘–’ Erase brush at the top of the Graduated
Filter panel and paint into these areas in order to
remove the effect. Press Y to show the Digital grad
mask, and if you click the Auto Mask box you’ll get
more accurate results when brushing/erasing.STEP 4 The finished image
After some further global image adjustments,
the histogram is looking much healthier – as is
the image. Don’t feel you need to squeeze the
histogram’s entire tonal range into the graph:
specular highlights on the water may still be
blown out, for example.AFTER23
Raw is no silver bullet...
Although it’s possible
to extract more detail from
Raw files, you should still try
to get the exposure right
in-camera. If the bright
areas have been extremely
overexposed, they’ll contain
no detail, and trying to
rescue them in software will
leave them looking muddy
and featureless. If you try and
brighten areas that were very
underexposed, you may just
reveal more noise.HIGHLIGHTS Severely overexposed highlights
will still look featureless. SHADOWS Brightening up strongly underexposed dark areas increases noise.SHADOWS
HIGHLIGHTS