- This topic has 11 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 6 years, 7 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
I took these pictures just tonight on a trip to town. I have driven by this field for years, and always wanted to get a good picture of it, but the lighting was perfect now, and I had my camera and 24-105mm lens along. I grabbed a few bracketed shots, as well as a couple of single frames in the brief moment before the sun sank. Any thoughts?
Attachments:
Wow, the lighting was pretty amazing! On my monitor, the “sun” part of the sunset looks a little oversaturated and clipped. Is that how it looks to you? I would be curious what the original RAW files looks like, especially the histogram…
That’s strange- my histogram looks pretty good here- no clipping at all as far as I can see. This is one of the single images- the rest are HDRs. Maybe it is a little too saturated- I am pretty heavy handed in post 🙂
Attachments:
OK. You want to be careful when you use the “Highlights” slider when you’re dealing with “blown out” areas in the sky (even if the histogram doesn’t show them as clipped). If you pull down the highlights too far, LR starts making things up to try to fill in the missing details, and you end up with a muddy mess. Even as good as digital sensors have become, they still struggle a bit with the huge dynamic range and strong colors of one of God’s sunset/sunrise masterpieces. 🙂
The screenshot you just posted looks better and more “natural” in my opinion.
Could I see a screenshot of the original file without any edits? Keep in mind that LR updates the histogram to reflect your edits, so that histogram you just posted isn’t an accurate representation of the original RAW file.
Thanks for the tip! Now that you mention it, I can see it too. Here is the unedited shot. It was actually pretty dark.
Attachments:
Ah ha! Now that histogram is telling the truth… 🙂 At least one channel is clipped in the highlights. I guess it’s a good thing you bracketed your shots!
By channel, you mean that blue spike in the middle of the graph? I assume it is in the blue channel, and I wonder where there is a overexposed blue spot in the picture. Or does it mean that the camera cannot handle the huge range of blues in the picture and is clipping them somewhere? There is a lot of blue in this picture, and from very dark to light- such as part of the creek all the way to the light sky. HDR is becoming my go to method for properly exposing landscape scenes, because I don’t have to chose between loosing my sky or the landscape. But that day, I didn’t have my tripod; I just set the camera on the rail of the bridge, kind of pinned it with one hand and used touchscreen controls to adjust my shutter speed. I wish I had slowed the shutter enough to blur the water, but without a tripod, it was hard to avoid blur everywhere from shaking 🙁
That is a fantastic shot! The sun is in just the perfect spot, right there between the hills. For the webinar on Tuesday, would you mind sending me the RAW file (james @ lenspiration . com) so I could experiment with editing it? You’ve found a fantastic location for a sunset.
@jamesstaddon might have already covered this in the Critique, but I’ll post it anyway for future reference. 🙂
When I refer to highlights being “clipped” I’m talking about the far right side of the histogram. See the screenshot below… The red boxes are showing where you should look for clipping in the shadows and highlights. In this case, the highlights and the shadows are clipped. (Look at the little triangles in the upper right/left corners of the histogram, they light up when something is clipping)
When you look all the way to the right of the histogram, it doesn’t look like there’s much data there, but the little triangle is what you need to look at. If it’s lit up, there’s clipping going on. The color of the little triangle indicates the channel being clipped, I think. For further explanation, see my RawTherapee tutorial, where I go into a little more detail about the histogram, and how we should edit our photos based on what we see there. Obviously the video is using software other than Lightroom, but the principles of editing are the same, regardless of the software we use to do so. If you want to learn more about histograms, check out this artice: https://photographylife.com/understanding-histograms-in-photography (I think it’s clean, but as always, when you’re on the internet be careful. I use an adblocker, so I don’t necessarily see what you will see.)
- This reply was modified 55 years, 4 months ago by .
Attachments:
Nope! I didn’t cover that in the webinar, so thank you @buddingphotographer!
Attached is what it ended up looking like after editing the original last night on the webinar. You can re-watch what I did at about minute 1:04:05, https://www.lenspiration.com/video/webinar091118/ I tweaked it a little bit more this morning, decreasing Clarity to help make it glow a bit, which I like, but I may still need to come back to it for more tweaking as I still have this inkling that the sky is still too dark for the amount of brightening that has been done to the foreground.
- This reply was modified 55 years, 4 months ago by .
Attachments:
Oh, now I remember. I knew about the little triangles, but I guess I just forgot about them. If you click on them, they will show you exactly where the clipping is happening. I like your edit, James! It looks more natural than mine. I should try it again. Thanks for your comments!
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.