P950: What PP can do

ANAYV wrote:

André BARELIER wrote:

Eightace wrote:

Do you find you get better results under or over exposing ?

I'd always heard of over exposing but only recently heard of people underexposing.

But your method seems to work.

I don't think it's a method. I think he made a mistake at the time of the shot,

True Andre. Not intended...at least not this much under exposed

but, thanks to his knowledge, he managed to recover the picture brilliantly.

Well...thanks to DXO .

Perhaps he will come back to confirm or deny.

About under or overexposure:

If you overexpose, the risk is to get burnt highlights. A burnt highlight is an area in the picture where there is no information left . In that case, you cannot recover anything.

Well...:)

One can bring back Some over exposed areas...if shooting RAW.

I'll have to find an exampke...someone on another forum used my shot of a waterfall that was over exposed ( I was trying to get milky water effect..but had no ND filter)

The person took that photo ..and another...to show how shooting RAW can bring back some blown highlights. Perhaps it was on a DXO forum...or the retouch forum here.

Yes, you can recover some highights when using raw, but not always all, because, when it's burnt, it's burnt. And there is nothing to recover.

Here is an example, shot with my D7200. It's a crop of a picture I took of the great Pharoah Sanders.

I recovered a lot of highlights, but not all. Some (small) parts are definitely burnt, and there are no details.

As you can see, if you go too far in correcting the exposure, the white turns to grey.

It is necessary to arbitrate between :
- recovering some details at the risk of the white becoming gray
- or sacrificing the burnt areas to keep the white white

That said, it's amazing how DxO allows to recover a lot of information from the raw files.

And I know that I am often too demanding!

DxO default

After correction

Underexposure leads to dark shadows. It is very unlikely that you underexpose to the point where there is nothing else than black in the underexposed area.

True. I used the word ' extreme' in my post . far from the norm

That's why you can always recover dark shadows, at the expense of noise.

True. Thabjs to programs like DXO...we can remove most of that noise...and keep most of the details...a tradeoff , as you so well I.ow.

But, as ANAYV said, today, softwares can do wonders at eliminating noise.

Indeed.

That's why, if you're not sure about the risk of blown hghlights, it's better to underexpose, and to bring back the shadows in PP.

I agree.

Shooting raw allows much better recovery than jpeg.

So true. Your insight always apreciated Andre.

ANAYV