Is it just me or does Canon sensors not seem to pull back highlight details in RAW? Obviously I strive to expose correctly, but When I shot other digital cameras (Nikon, Olympus, etc.) in the past it seemed like I could pull back about 2 stops over-exposed images. i haven’t found that to be true with my Canon R5. It actually seems to be able to lift shadows better than bring down highlights….which doesn’t make sense to me with ETTR.
To be clear I’m not dissing Canon. I love my camera. Im just a little confused on the sensor differences. Has anyone else experienced this? I are there specific settings to restrict highlight detail, but preserve shadows more?
TIA
I don't know exactly what you did, and there has been a lot of debate on this topic above the definition and methods of ETTR. My understanding of ETTR is to adjust the exposure such that the histogram just touches the right of the screen. So, in theory, there should be no clipping. If you ignore the right tail of the histogram, ETTR based on the right hand "mass," you have a significant number of pixels that are more than 2ev blown out.
My conclusion (as supported below) is that there is about 2ev of headroom with the R5's RAW files.
Also, it is pretty subjective and easy to miss clipping when looking at the histogram on the back of a camera. The only "highlight/clipping" alert is available on playback, so unless you take a test picture, you would not know if you are clipping more than you think. It would be nice if there was a clipping option when shooting stills (there are zebra bars in video, but not photo, mode).
I was looking at a photo that was a bit overexposed with a specular highlight that was blown out. It hit me that this picture might provide a good test of the R5's headroom. (It would have been useful to have used a circular polarizer to eliminate the specular highlight - something to try next time)
First, I want to note that I was shooting airplanes against a bright sky, and I set the evaluative metering (should weight on the focus point) to +1ev because the sky was so much brighter than the planes and due to the sun's direction. I didn't want the planes to be too dark and figured I could recover +1ev without a problem. As this was "unplanned," there was an ISO value of ISO500. I guess for a "true test," it should have been ISO100. Additionally, I was using all electronic shutter, which if anything, should hurt the dynamic range.
BTW, the plane was taxing/moving slowly. I use the RF100-500 at 100mm and 1/125th of (I think I was using IS mode 1).
For the picture used in this test, the plane was coming in for a landing with the ground behind the plane, and the plane came out overexposed (by about 1ev as I had set on the camera). There is the specular highlight that, in turn, is much brighter and blown out. I ran an experiment where I corrected in Adobe Camera RAW by 0ev (as shot), -1ev (as should have been shot), and -2.4ev (based on eliminating all clipping when viewed in ACR).
I found it particularly interesting to look at the yellow part of the plane's roundel marking. As long as the red and green are not blown, it will be yellow.
Below are the 3 roundels side by side with the various adjustments. Particularly note how progressively more of the yellow is recovered at about 45 degrees to the left of the center. It looks like I can recover about 2ev of the color in the roundel.
Below is the final edited image at full resolution. I ended up blending about 80% of the -1ev on top of the -2.4ev. I then use Topaz Sharpen AI on the result and added +20 saturation to make the colors pop a little more.
Most of the time Auto WB does the job.
