In my last blog article I discussed a way of extending the dynamic range of the camera through multiple exposures and then blending them (and essentially compressing the range) into a finished image. This technique is very powerful but has a number of limitations in outdoor/nature photography — where things tend not to stand still.
Part of the “magic” of blending the multiple images depends on the image itself to be fairly static. Moving water, wind, etc. can make it impossible to have images that only differ by exposure values.
I had take a set of images of another foggy scene with the intent of blending them with Enfuse. But as part of a quick review I noticed that the spider webs in the foreground were moving slightly. There wasn’t any wind to speak of, but there was enough to move the delicate webbing and the result was going to be a mess (see below, the left hand image is from the LR2/Enfuse blending of 4 images, the right is a single image):
What to do?! (OK, I’ll admit that my composition is not all that spectacular, particularly when viewed relatively tiny on a screen, but a major visual element of the image was those spider webs!)
While the camera was not able to truly capture the entire dynamic range of the scene, it did get pretty darn close! And for this scene the brightest element is the sun itself, which is about as featureless as you could hope for. The bottom line is that the RAW image captured a fair amount of the detail in the scene and we can use tools like Lightroom to squeeze the information into the range that reflected what I was seeing when I took the photograph. Of the bracketed images I took there were two that were “workable”. I was able to apply the same changes (although different values) to both and get nearly identical results. The image at the top of the post is the processed version of this image:
First some global corrections were applied: Fill light: 30, Recovery: 11, Black level: 11. Bit of clarity and vibrance. This was the foundation for two local corrections:
1) A graduated filter was applied to the top half of the scene dropping the exposure by 1 stop and, to keep the fog foggy, a little bit of negative clarity — preventing the sharpening tools from finding any edges in the fog.
2) A second graduated filter was applied to the bottom half of the scene, dropping the exposure 1/4 stop, and slightly increasing the clarity and saturation.
One of the main reasons for shooting RAW, particularly in scenes with lots of dynamic range, is the ability of tools like Lightroom / Aperture / etc. to make use of every bit of the information there and, with a few easy steps, perform the same steps that would take Ansel Adams days (or certainly hours) to fine-tune in the darkroom and produce a final image that closely matches what the photographer saw (and felt) when they pressed the shutter button.
Will this work for any scene? Of course not! But for many classes of landscape images you can certainly “push the envelope” and find a great photograph hiding in that file.
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by Dave
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