Last time I checked my towel didn't need to be fed or a litter box...
Kidding aside you missed the point of the exercise and blew the red channel in the kid's face. Open in Levels, hold down alt/opt, and click the highlight slider and you'll see what I'm talking about.
For the cat or towel to be of any real use it needs to be placed in the shot where you want the exposure correct; i.e., next to the highlight side the kid's face.
I'll leave it up to you to decide whether its easier to get the cat or a towel up there.
cgardner wrote:
Last time I checked my towel didn't need to be fed or a litter box...
Kidding aside you missed the point of the exercise and blew the red channel in the kid's face. Open in Levels, hold down alt/opt, and click the highlight slider and you'll see what I'm talking about.
For the cat or towel to be of any real use it needs to be placed in the shot where you want the exposure correct; i.e., next to the highlight side the kid's face.
I'll leave it up to you to decide whether its easier to get the cat or a towel up there. ...Show more →
Thanks Chuck!
I read a lot of your extensive and very informative answerings on this forum. They were very helpfull and I learned a lot from it.
Hence, the title "cat for a towel", was with a big blink of the eye.
I didn't get highlight alerts for the reds while processing. Lighting was measured 1/3 below clipping whites (just above chair),
Considered this being most important.
The white cat almost ruined the paper backdrop, but before chasing it away (mind: no cats were harmed), I took a few snaps
Thanks again for replying, Ill check on the reds and see how to improve those!
RT.
addendum
Checked the raw files and the jpegs
The blown reds are introduced by poor processing by me, the raws are fine
Thanks for the alt/slider trick!
Its often the case that things change at the 16 > 8 bit conversion to JPG stage for web viewing which is why the Levels trick is helpful as a final QC check. I suspected clipping occurred in editing because your test shot of the cat, when checked in Levels, is actually about 1/3 stop underexposed. The slider can move left to about 243 before the brightest highlights on edge of the chair start to click (about 1/3 stop).
I also noticed you kept the background darker as I suggest, which makes the white furniture seem whiter by comparison perceptually.
When you do photograph the cat as the star of the show try using silver umbrellas vs soft boxes. The specular reflections in the highlights in combination with the more distinct shadows creates a more realistic illusion of 3D on white fur than the more diffuse light from a SB.
Part of process control is anticipation on the front end what the final product will look like.
To avoid clipping in the reds start with 1/3 stop less exposure when you shoot. The reason I recommend the towel next to the face trick is because the towel clips in all three channels about the same time as red clips in the skin. So if you keep the towel which you can see 1/3 stop below the point it clips in the playback, then you will also be keeping the red channel in the skin you can't see in the playback 1/3 stop below clipping.
Now that you know what to look for, shoot a bracketed test series and run them through the complete RAW > JPG cycle. Find the best looking one, then go back to the same file in the camera and examine the playback warning and how much more exposure it takes before the towel clips if it isn't already. That will tell you how much to back off the exposure from the point of clipping when shooting to preserve the highlight detail all the way through the JPG for web stage.
Don't worry about the slight underexposure that might result in the RAW file, consider it insurance against blown detail in areas closer to the lights than where the towel indicator is located. Another advantage of the towel trick is you can use several around a scene to determine how even the lighting is on face vs shoulder, etc.
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