One thing this thread demonstrates is that there’s more than one way to skin a… heron? ;-)
Also, I think some people might be surprised just how much you can bring up shadow detail in post with the right approaches, exposure, and tools. This example has nothing to do with birds, but it is one that I shared recently, so here it is again.
Photographing from a high prominence in the mountains of Death Valley National Park before sunrise, I was faced with a huge dynamic range between intensely red/orange clouds to the east and very dark valleys below. (Being particularly hot in one channel, those bright clouds posed a more serious challenge than hot white tones.) I did bracket exposures in case it turned out that I would need to merge images in post. But I was able to produce an image from a single raw frame by means of some post-processing magic that I contemplated at the time of exposure.
Here’s what I started with:
And here’s the end result:
The initial edit left me with significant noise in the lifted deep shadows (highly magnified crop of a dark section near the bottom):
But NR (in this case Adobes AI Denoise) reduced this to a level where you would not notice it at all in a print.
So don’t be afraid to lift shadows in post, even radically. You can do a _lot_ with underexposed shadows, but there’s very little (and sometimes nothing) you can do with blown highlights.
Mar 01, 2026 at 04:43 PM
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