old-gregg wrote:
@gdanmitchell@, JPEG as a final destination medium is fine. In fact, it is a luxury: JPEG can hold more information (DR and gamut) than all papers and most monitors are capable of. The problem isn't the medium, the problem is that the JPEG engine in the A7RVI is the same tech as in the Canon 1D, as if 20 years of progress between them didn't happen.
To some extent I'm not as concerned about this as you are since I prefer to shoot raw and get the full benefit of the camera's capabilities.
On the other hand, I suspect that before long we'll start to see mainline camera companies develop (or buy!) software like that used on smartphones, which does all kinds of "intelligent" things with the raw capture before feeding us the final result.
Regarding exposure, the idea usually (with room for some exceptions) is to protect the highlights even if that means lowering the original exposure and then bringing back dark tones later. In digital capture, once lost, highlight tones over the maximum value that can be recorded cannot be reclaimed. They are gone. ON the other hand, you can recover shadows quite effectively — you may have to apply NR but that's not nearly the problem it used to be.
Let me give you a recent example of this. Last week I was photographing in the Sierra Nevada in the Yosemite high country. I found a forested hill with very strong backlight, and I wanted to photograph the trunks of the trees with some of that bright light coming between them.
This is the photograph that I had in mind, more or less, as I made the exposure:
But the dynamic range in the actual scene was huge. About 1/3 of the way down from the top is almost direct light from the sun, only slightly muted by some branches. In the foreground are very dark shadows, not only because they are on the dark side of the trees but additionally because they are inside the forest.
So I knowing that I had to protect those highlights and that I could recover the shadows in post, I used an exposure that put the brightest tones right around the level at which they would blow out. That left the dark tones looking essentially black — which was intentional. Here's a copy of the image with no adjustment applied:
old-gregg wrote:
@gdanmitchell@, JPEG as a final destination medium is fine. In fact, it is a luxury: JPEG can hold more information (DR and gamut) than all papers and most monitors are capable of. The problem isn't the medium, the problem is that the JPEG engine in the A7RVI is the same tech as in the Canon 1D, as if 20 years of progress between them didn't happen.
To some extent I'm not as concerned about this as you are since I prefer to shoot raw and get the full benefit of the camera's capabilities.
On the other hand, I suspect that before long we'll start to see mainline camera companies develop (or buy!) software like that used on smartphones, which does all kinds of "intelligent" things with the raw capture before feeding us the final result.
Regarding exposure, the idea usually (with room for some exceptions) is to protect the highlights even if that means lowering the original exposure and then bringing back dark tones later. In digital capture, once lost, highlight tones over the maximum value that can be recorded cannot be reclaimed. They are gone. ON the other hand, you can recover shadows quite effectively — you may have to apply NR but that's not nearly the problem it used to be.
Aug 31, 2026 at 09:18 PM
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