Blown highlights

WelshNoob

WelshNoob

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Just getting to grips with my 60D. Using the highlight warning on picture previews when a picture is taken. There are highlight areas that flash black indicating that they are blown. Is the idea to try and totally eliminate these when taking a picture? The blown parts are say, a corner of something metal catching the sun, or corner of a window in a room etc.
 
WelshNoob said:
Just getting to grips with my 60D. Using the highlight warning on picture previews when a picture is taken. There are highlight areas that flash black indicating that they are blown. Is the idea to try and totally eliminate these when taking a picture? The blown parts are say, a corner of something metal catching the sun, or corner of a window in a room etc.
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It really depends on whether there is any detail in those particular areas that you want to keep.

If you, for example, wanted to show the outside through the window then you would probably need to use 3 or more exposures and combine them in an HDR program.

If you don't need to have such details then you simply expose as desired.

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As above, it really depends on what parts of the image are blown.

If you were doing wedding photography and were trying to get a detailed shot of the bride's white dress you wouldn't want to blow that, although in some circumstanses it might be OK if small areas were blown (depending on the effect you were going for).

Using the same example, if it was a large group shot and the bride's dress was blown but it was necessary to do so to expose the rest of the shot correctly it might also be acceptable.

There's no right or wrong really, it's an indicator that needs to be considered depending on the circumstances and desired outcome.

If you use it with the mindset of "are those bits blinking at me important" and take it from there you should be OK ;)
 
Thanks. If there are blown parts whats the best remedy? Faster shutter?
 
WelshNoob said:
Thanks. If there are blown parts whats the best remedy? Faster shutter?
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Faster shutter,narrower aperture, lower iso or a combination of all 3!
Basically you need to let less light in to prevent the bright parts over exposing but you then risk under exposing the rest of the picture!
 
If you are shooting in manual then there are three ways, faster shutter, lower iso or smaller aperture (higher number) depending on what you are trying to achive.
If your shooting in av or tv then exposure compensation.
 
Depending on the subject and what's blowing then ND grads are another potential way....
 
Look at a scene for 10 seconds then shut your eyes. What looks blown in residual vision won't look too unnatural when a photo shows it as blown. Some parts of some images can't help blowing (directly reflected highlights off chrome for example), the aim is to reduce the blown areas to a minimum rather than to eliminate all of them all of the time!
 
Personally I let some areas blow if it means that the scene will look more realistic or just... nicer :D Sometimes the lighting is such that things are blown to our eyes so capturing the scene as it looks seems like a perfectly valid choice to me :D
 
It depends on the photo. A few blinking areas are ok BUT only iglf there dead areas in the frame. If your shooting flowing water with a slow shutter the last thing you want is to blow out the water. Use your ev comp if its just a few lil areas
 
Nod said:
Look at a scene for 10 seconds then shut your eyes. What looks blown in residual vision won't look too unnatural when a photo shows it as blown. Some parts of some images can't help blowing (directly reflected highlights off chrome for example), the aim is to reduce the blown areas to a minimum rather than to eliminate all of them all of the time!
Click to expand...
confused about this part, do you mean what looks blown in residual vision should be left as blown otherwise it wont look natural?
woof woof said:
Personally I let some areas blow if it means that the scene will look more realistic or just... nicer :D Sometimes the lighting is such that things are blown to our eyes so capturing the scene as it looks seems like a perfectly valid choice to me :D
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+1, i like blown highlights, a little bit of flaring and ghosting as well, makes the image looks more "cinematic" :D
 
It's generally easier to recover details from Shadows (even if noisier) than it is to get details back from blown highlights so a lot of people will lean more to exposing for the highlights (especially when shooting raw where you have a larger dynamic range to play with) you can then balance the exposure in PP.

But sometimes it's unavoidable. Try shooting a sunset without blowing the sun ;) if it's only a small part of the photo and unimportant to the composition then sometimes it's better to balance.
 
Kyle, pretty much yes. Some things are just too bright to see if we can see other things as they are - basically, if the main subject isn't blown (barring any directly reflected sunlight off chrome etc!), I can live with the results. I try not to let skies get too badly blown but there are sometimes very white clouds that show no detail to normal vision so I tend to let them go too - if they're too extensive, I might drop in some more detail but I tend not to bother!
 
However, unless HDR's done very well and carefully, it looks unnatural.
 
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