Same issue more help

[jgaddy]

Here is a post I made at another forum....hopefully, I can get more help here:

Although my PS skills are getting better, I am trying to overcome an exposure related issue that maybe some of you could explain to me.

How do you handle exposure when you are photographing a person indoor or out and the person is wearing white clothing or especially reds, pinks or other bight colors and you clip the clothing badly before you can get the correct exposure on the face? Even if in even softer lighting I struggle with this issue.....

Is the only game plan to expose with out clipping anything and deal with the issue in post? Logic tells me so and if this is the case, how are you dealing with it in post? What specifically is your process for this in PS?

I have to assume that I am missing something basic in post processing as it would seem that every wedding photographer would be dealing with this with every bride unless they are ok with under-exposed face......

Here just a quick sample:

http://web.mac.com/jgaddy/iWeb/John%...s/IMG_3971.jpg

Please understand that this image is for illustration only......as it has whites in it that will clip keeping the exposure to low for an overall good exposure across all tone....In other words, the white bury the other tones from proper placement.

The advice I am looking for here is not how to place strobes or flashes as candid styles shots are almost impossible to arrange lighting for.....

I would ask for anyone willing to help to open the image and tell me how you deal with these situations. I am hoping that we do not get into "apply 50 layers and take 45 minutes to get the image up to speed" as dealing with 350 event caniids could cause some time issues.

This image was converted in ACR. For what this sample image is, I think the quality is good but of course the image is flat.

The way I see it, and I am hoping some can give advice on this, is in order to get this image exposed properly in camera, I would have to sacrifice significant amount of whites that would blow on the shirt, surrounding surfaces as well as blowing out the hand.

When asking these questions, maybe I am not using the right terminology....I am looking to get a well balanced image whether straight from the camera or in post....either way, I am not finding a quick and easy way to accomplish this.

Thanks for the help!

[Nevyn]

I'm missing soemthing with this one - when I open the link, the whites in the image don't look blown at all and the skin tones look okay. It's flat and could do with some contrast / colour pop but it's not blown.
Is your monitor properly calibrated?

[PeteQ]

I think I understand your question, but there is no simple answer other than to set the proper exposure for the area you want correctly exposed and the rest are going to have to fall where they may, especially in candids. Any scene that has dramatic contrasts will offer challenges to you exposure limitations. I shoot a lot of horse events and between horse movement and sun angles sometimes I have to decide what is going to be lost, either lose the correct exposure on the shadows or possibly blow out the sky. As the rider is more important (to me) I choose to expose for the rider and shadow and let the sky fall where it may. I tend to use spot metering mode so I can really focus the meter on the area I want to get my reading from, rather than let the camera decide through Nikon's matrix mode or whatever Canon's version of that mode is.

You can also use zooming/cropping to help focus your attention and thereby mitigate the areas that may not be as evenly exposed as you would like.

Yes, there are ways in PS to do some sort of simple corrections, but getting the image as close to what you want in camera first will go a ong way to reducing you PS processing time. Don't know if this helps, but hope it does.

[jeffkohn]

Since you're shooting RAW and converting with ACR, controlling highlights while giving a boost to the midtones shouldn't be much of a problem assuming you don't have an extreme contrast situation (ie white shirt in direct sunlight, not much you can do there). Try boosting the "brightness" slider to get the midtones where you want them and then add a bit of negative adjustment to the Exposure slider to control the highlights. These two controls do interact a bit so it can be a somewhat iterative process, but since Exposure primarily affects the white point and Brightness mainly shifts the midtones, I've found this approach to work well for many shots.

If you're still having problems, the Curves tab in ACR 3.x might help since you can target specific tones more easily. Another thing I'd suggest is leaving the Contrast slider fairly low (maybe even going below the default). It's OK if the image comes out of ACR looking a bit flat because there are many ways to increase contrast in PS while targeting specific areas through layer masks or blend properties. Also large-radius USM can help provide local contrast in the midtones without drastically affecting the shadows/highlights (try 15, 60, 1).

If you want, you can post the original RAW file from your sample and let some of us take a crack at it to see what does/doesn't work.