Martin Hensen
My Multi Raw file editing technique
Page 1, The Exposure
Under normal non extreme lighting conditions the modern camera of today will give a well balanced exposure for highlight and shadows, in some circumstances fill flash will also improve things further but where flash is not practical editing techniques in your photo editing software will enable you to fine tune the exposure short falls in the highlight and shadow regions to produce a well balanced image. but there are times when in say landscape photography to produce a dramatic shot of the lighting manifesting itself in front of you the only way to capture this is to shoot into the light this in turn presents a problem for your camera as to what exposure it will set in either manual or auto, what will happen is that it will generally be fooled by the brightness of the sky area and underexpose the image leaving the foreground with no detail at all or so little data that even adjusting the exposure slider in the Raw converter will not bring out the shadow detail needed, so a method of capturing both highlight and shadow detail is need to provide the right kinds of exposure to produce workable data in these areas, below is a detailed explanation of how to achieve this using two Raw images of the same subject but at different exposure levels then using theses to produce an image with both areas giving acceptable highlight and shadow detail., the image I have chosen as an example is one of very high contrast in the sky area and a dark foreground one that would be impossible to produce using on exposure.
First it must be said that lens of high quality are better used for a shot like this as they will control flare to a minimum also a pro type camera is better as the mirror flip and exposure are achieved much faster than budget DSLR cameras, the reason for this is that using a tripod to shoot the same image 3 times is the best way but not always practical, in the image below if i had attempted to set up my tripod the lighting effect in the sky would have gone so i used the cameras auto bracketing sequence to give me 3 exposures and by using the 1DMK2 this was achieved at a very quick pace with minimal subject movement that would not cause a problem in later editing when copy and pasting the image in Photoshop, when taking photograph try to brace yourself so that the camera does not move or as little as possible, I also use a graduated grey filter to reduce the intensity.
| Aperture-Priority AE Tv( Shutter Speed ) 1/640 Av( Aperture Value ) 13.0 Metering Mode Evaluative Metering Exposure Compensation -2 Autoexposure Bracketing 0 ISO Speed 100 Lens 17.0 - 40.0 mm Focal Length 40.0 mm |
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Image 1 |
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| Aperture-Priority AE Tv( Shutter Speed ) 1/3200 Av( Aperture Value ) 13.0 Metering Mode Evaluative Metering Exposure Compensation -2 Autoexposure Bracketing -2 1/3 ISO Speed 100 Lens 17.0 - 40.0 mm Focal Length 40.0 mm |
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image 2 |
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Aperture-Priority AE Tv( Shutter Speed ) 1/125 Av( Aperture Value ) 13.0 Metering Mode Evaluative Metering Exposure Compensation -2 Autoexposure Bracketing +2 1/3 ISO Speed 100 Lens 17.0 - 40.0 mm Focal Length 40.0 mm |
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image 3 |
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| From the 3 bracketed exposures i choose images 2 and 3 for my edit, image two provided with highlights in tact and image 3 with foreground detail present, i did nt choose image 1 as highlight detail in the central part had blown, "over exposed" | ||||||