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 p.10 #8 · Utility of dynamic range beyond a certain point | |
tctmp wrote:
While I understand it's a personal choice, this picture looks unnatural to me immediately. The upper band of yellow that's as bright as the sun, I don't think it needs to be a photographer who's heavily engaged in post processing to notice this. People who have seen open space sunsets a few times will likely catch that already.
It is “unnatural,” of course. no human eye and no camera can actually look directly into the sun that way and see everything that is in the photograph. The “natural” experience of looking that direction might be to risk blindness. And the birds would be moving. And the difference in brightness et seen the direct sun and the dark areas at the bottom would be beyond the ability of eyes to perceive.
Maybe I’ll hunt up the original raw later on and show you what the “reality” (from the camera’s perspective) actually looked like. :-)
There’s this idea that the best photographs are “real” and just the result of getting all the settings right and punching the shutter release. A perfect copy of “reality” will emerge from the camera.
But that’s how photography works.
As we’ve discussed in this thread, the camera does not “see” the way that human vision sees, and it is really a lost cause to chase that impossible goal. Cameras stop action. Cameras allow action to blur the subject. Cameras capture image elements that cannot be seen. (For example, color in extremely low light.)
I also agree that those of us who understand post-processing through experience are likely to look at a photograph like this
one, realize that it could not possibly be the results of a simple capture, and speculate about how it was realized. (Do that with Adam’s “Moonrise, Hernandez” sometime…)
As to your aesthetic response to the photograph, I’m fine with that. I’ve learned that there is nothing creative that any of us can do in this world that will be loved by everyone, and I expect that not every photograph will speak to every viewer. :-)
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ruthenium wrote:
1) Preventing or minimizing highlight clipping is achieved by adjusting exposure, not by extending the dynamic range.
2) An extended dynamic range can allow capturing more light. The utility of this is in the shadows, not in the highlights. ..
Conceptually this is right on. In situations where the subject contains a wide dynamic range, strive for a curve where the brightest tones are as close to the right edge as possible (to generalize) without blowing them out and then plan to recover/lighten the darkest tones in post.
Another way to say it is that the goal is to capture the maximum range of usable image data in the file so that you can realize the final image in post.
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Daran wrote:
It is not. It may have eluded you, but I did not write that masks make bad images. Not sure why what I meant wasn't obvious to you, but maybe you just wanted to use me as a segway? If so, I'm sorry I responded.
Here’s what you actually wrote:
Daran wrote:
One mans flaw is another mans feature. By using masks you introduce discontinuities into your processing. Which if overdone (common) is something that makes the result look artificial. A safer and more natural approach (assuming the required DR range isn't too wide) is to limit yourself to monotone continuous transfer curves, where what is brighter consistently remains brighter, just not by as much. The C1 HDR adjustments do just this and tend to work very well for typical scenes with a bright sky. But even there, if you overdo it, the result can look cooked.
Also, I suspect you meant “segue,” not “segway?” ;-)
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fjablo wrote:
Lots of tech talk (and it is impressive technology), yet we still haven't seen a real-world example where this increased DR would come in handy, have we? I guess the original question still stands 
That’s a fair point, for sure! (I can’t help you since I have neither the A7r6 nor A7r5, etc.)
I’ll speculate, based on doing a lot of photography with cameras that have various levels of DR capability that…
… the differences between most of the cameras that people want to compare here will be pretty darned trivial, bordering on insignificant in real world photography.
That doesn’t mean that continuing to expand camera dynamic range isn’t a worthwhile endeavor. It just means that each incremental step along the way will often be quite small. The improvement from one model to its successor is rarely earthshaking. The sum improvement since my first digital camera (in the mid-1990s) until today is utterly remarkable.
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I’ll end this post (finally!) and get back to the initial “utility of dynamic range beyond a certain point” question by reprising a context that helps me frame the DR stuff. Relative to DR differences among cameras there are three situations you might encounter:
1. The scene/subject presents a dynamic range no larger than what can be handled by essentially any good camera. This is by far the most common situation.
2. the subject presents a dynamic range that is so large that no current camera (that any of us has access to) can fully handle it in a single exposure. This is a small percentage of shots, but it does happen.
3. The subject presents a dynamic range that is just barely within the range of the best DR camera and just slightly out of range of some alternative camera with incrementally smaller DR and the difference is visible in the final image. This is extremely rare.
Edited on Jun 21, 2026 at 10:51 AM · View previous versions
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