Alan321 Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · Owner of a brand new D800E + Sigma 35 1.4 combo !! | |
Ghostinz wrote:
amazing shot.... obviously from a tripod, but why did you adjust the EV? Just curious. I have been shooting RAW, so I never mess with the EV. Maybe someone can educate me on that.
The amount of high exposure headroom that you can get from a raw file varies with your in-camera (jpg) settings for contrast (especially), saturation, WB, picture style, etc. You could have very little headroom compared to what the histogram shows you on the camera and you could easily lose some highlights. It is rare I think to have much more than one stop of headroom for highlights. Furthermore, some colours will suffer because they don't contribute much to luminance and the metering system may let them overexpose in a way that cannot be recovered. Reducing the exposure at capture time allows more of those sunset reds and oranges and yellows to be recovered but will darken the shadows.
However, the D800 in particular has abundant dynamic range at low ISO that allows us to pull clean and well exposed details from what initially looks like blackness. A 5-stop boost is quite feasible in the shadows. More than that gets noisy but it still an incredible feat when combined with 36Mpx resolution..
Put these two thoughts together and you are better off slightly underexposing a raw capture at low ISO to save both highlight and shadow details. Obviously, the metering pattern will have an impact too so like all "rules" it can still come unstuck. In general, though, you can get a lot of clean DR to fit comfortable in a jpg after a bit of raw file tweaking.
Our eyes and brain can see much of the shadow detail and much of the highlight detail in a scene but not all at the same time. Squeezing that extra DR into a jpg simulates what we are able to see even though it is not entirely natural as an overall view.
Once you get above about 200-400 ISO even the D800 loses enough DR that the ISO 100 detail recovery miracles cannot be done so cleanly. Then we have to pay more attention to what matters most in a scene and set the correct exposure at capture time.
- Alan
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