DPReview.com is closing April 10th - Find out more

Which photo Can survive? Over or Under-exposed photo?

Started Mar 25, 2019 | Questions thread
ProfHankD
ProfHankD Veteran Member • Posts: 9,147
Re: Which photo Can survive? Over or Under-exposed photo?
1

petrochemist wrote:

In digital photography once data is lost by overexposure clipping there is no-way to regain that data. But if the parts concerned have no information of interest this doesn't matter.

Under exposed digital images (especially if recorded in RAW) can have a lot of information pulled out of underexposed areas.

With film it depends on the type of film. IIRC a fair bit can be done to recover highlights from over-exposed negatives & less from under-exposed ones. Slides are generally better slightly under-exposed if you can't get the exposure right. If the exposure issues are known about before processing the film a considerable degree of adjustment can be done by over or under developing as required. Some films were routinely 'pushed' by 5 stops in astrophotography.

Just to add, I've recently been very surprised at just how much image content can be recovered from grossly underexposed color slides.

Although there often appears to be no visible image content at all, HDR (high dynamic range) imaging of slides was able to recover image data that was 10 or more stops underexposed! Not saying this always works, but that it ever works is shocking.

 ProfHankD's gear list:ProfHankD's gear list
Canon PowerShot SX530 Olympus TG-860 Sony a7R II Canon EOS 5D Mark IV Sony a6500 +32 more
Keyboard shortcuts:
FForum PPrevious NNext WNext unread UUpvote SSubscribe RReply QQuote BBookmark MMy threads
Color scheme? Blue / Yellow