Highlight Tone Priority

[Julius]

Is there an advantage to enabling the highlight tone priority on a 5D MII?

[Jarhead5811]

Can't say about the 5D II but on my XSi it seems fairly useless, for me. The most notable thing is it removes ISO 100 as a option and goes straight toISO 200. (and the font on the ISO display seem fancier [:P])

[Daniel Browning]

Is there an advantage to enabling the highlight tone priority on a 5D MII?

For JPEG and video, it's a good processing technique to increase highlight headroom (and therefore dynamic range).


For raw, the only benefit is that it makes the preview JPEG (the image embedded in the raw file and displayed on the camera LCD) a little more useful.

[freelanceshots]

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<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"]If your shooting a scene that has dark
colors plus the same scene has bright whites in it then using the highlight tone
priority option will be the most beneficial. An example of a scene that many
people might encounter this scenero is with wedding photography where the
groom is dressed in mainly black and the bride is mostly in white.
Digital cameras can not really capture that broad a range of detail
from dark to light as your human eye and even film cameras as they still have the advantage in that
area. The basic purpose of the highlight tone priority is to
capture a little bit more detail in the highlights but still capture it in the dark areas as well. Fine detail in the white areas of images
(example folds in the dress) usually get lost unless you expose for
them but then you might loose detail in the shadows when you go the
other way. One downfall of using the highlight tone priority
option is that your images may encounter a little more noise usually in the darker shadows. I'm not
the say all be all but that's how I understand it. I use it when
shooting sky scenes where there are dark areas of the scene plus
very bright areas as well. Using it just gives me a little bit more
range in the detail and that is appreciated. I actually have it in my custom menu so
that I can access it quickly.