Old Shed

[twistedphrame]

At first I thought I over exposed this far to much but after
changing to BW I'm actually fairly happy with this. It's an old shed
that used to be part of a horse ranch until the state got hold of it
and let it slip into disrepair. To get the shot I had to stand on a guard rail to see over the weeds along the road.


Settings:


Camera: Xti


Lens 24-70 f2.8L


Manual exposure


Shutter: 1/640


Ap: 4.0


ISO 200








let me know what you think.


~Jordan

[Bob]

Yes it is over exposed.

[twistedphrame]

Yeah I figured As much, I should have said, it was completely over cast that day which is why the sky is pretty much a solid white

[Keith B]

Yeah I figured As much, I should have said, it was completely over cast that day which is why the sky is pretty much a solid white

If you have Photoshop you can go Image>Adjustments>Shadow/Highlights and you might be able to get some sky back.

[twistedphrame]

I originally did that with the .raw but i didn't really like the little amount detail there was in the sky so I went with that version.








I messed around with the jpeg just now ( I have a habit of deleting the .RAWs once I get them somewhere near where I like them since they take up so much space), all I did was turn up the black quite a bit to get a much more monotone image.

[Keith B]

I hear you. The exposure on the first one looks good except the sky. Probably a Neutral Density filter day.

[Madison]

*IF* you have *some* data left in the overexposed areas, *and* you have Lightroom 2:


You can add a gradient from top to horizon, and experiment with (localised) exposure and contrast settings to get that data back.


(But for data to come back it has to be in there hidden somewhere, something I am not too sure about if I look at the first picture).


But it's a tip. I managed to get some washed out skies back with that. Looking quite good actually. You *could* even add a bit of blue (in the same gradient) so your sky will have some tone in it when converted to black & white).

[Colin]

Gradient's a creative solution I never even considered. I wish I thought of it [] My experience, at least within the last few years, is limited to what I can do with DPP (I used Raw shooter essentials a bit too, which incidentally had an interesting look when you pushed thingsthat reminds me of a lot of the HDR 'look'.


Regardless of the software, the histogram is your friend. You can tell if there is in fact any more information to try to resolve. If the whites are stacked up all on the top, then you've got a whole lot of 100%, and simply bringing it down is just going to slide the same information down, and clip your blacks, as in the second picture.


In my own experience it seemsthat even if the information is there, it's difficult to see detail (or print it with detail) if it's in the very top or bottom of the histogram. It doesn't come out as detail so much as texture or tones in black and white.


If you just adjust the brightness to get detail from the bright, you usually sacrifice detail in the black.


If you try to maintain detail in both, you need to decrease the contrast, to fit the entire dynamic range sothat what you want detailed is within the more moderate dynamic range. However, when you do that, the picture looks flat and lifeless.


You can then tweak the curves, often pushing down the lower middle area more or less to maintain the feeling of dark without losing the detail, and pushing up the upper middle to maintain the feeling of bright highlights without blowing them out. Or maybe you're pushing up the middle to increase overall sense of brightness without driving out your highlights.


I haven't found any particular process that works well for most of everything, which I thinkis why most of the supplied 'picture styles' kind of suck. I can see using 'neutral' if you're going to post process, and just adjust the exposure compensation to maintain the information and maximize the use of the bit depth, and the sharpness control/lens correction/noise filteringto maximize the picture detail without adding distracting, non-detail artifacts. Otherwise, I almost always opt for 'Faithful' and aim for the same route (with less subdued color and dynamic range on the RAW output), and work in the RGB tab for what I think looks good to me.


It'd be really nice to have the time to take a photoshop class or something. It's kind of nutty the things people can do with some skill. Awesome nutty.