Blown out highlights in photos

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vecsri

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Richard Black
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How do you reduce this when taking photos?
 
You spot meter off the white parts and reduce the exposure by a stop or two.
 
Or ND grad filters, if blown out sky is your problem.
 
Janice i 'think' i understand that.
I want to avoid filters really.
 
Dare I also sugest trying a bit of HDR (although not really practical to use all the time). Shoot in RAW if you can, as that give you a bit more room to play with if you don't expose the pic corectly.
 
I bought a 2gb mem card so i can start looking at raw too
 
Shoot RAW this will give you more latitude. However chose your RAW converter carefully some have more functionality than others.

RAW dosen't solve all your problems but it can help. If the subjects dynamic range is to high, you may have trouble in keeping the highlights yet making sure the shadows are OK as well.This may be where HDR could help.

Experiment with both, you;ll probably find that you'll end up using combination of both, depending on the subject

Shooting RAW or JPEG don't forget to look at your histogram. It'll tell you if you've over exposed the highlights .
 
If you underexpose slightly then you are able to recover parts of the image, but if you overexpose i.e. blown highlights, then this is effectively white-out and there's nothing one can do about it to recover.

This is why (I believe) some togs set their cameras to underexpose by -0.3 on most photographs. Images are recoverable this way...

Just a FYI
 
One more thing to consider....

- Blown highlights (histogram up against the right hand side endstop) are white.. blown .. gone forever
- Unexposed lowlights (against the left hand side endstop) are black .. gone forever.

[actually thats not strictly true if you work with RAW then the histogram you see is calculated from the Cameras internal JPG, so it's slightly inaccurate.]

However its good to know where to expose for best results.
It turns out that for digital RAW shots it's to the right. ie the if you can get the hump of the histogram over to the right side, without it slapping into the end stop then you'll have more latitude to correct.

Here's some info
http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=13437
 
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