Dynamic range is the difference between this and this.
If you've ever taken a picture and the sky looks completely solid white
even though you could see texture in the clouds with your eyes, that's a dynamic
range problem.
If you're taking a picture and your subjects faces were completely in shadow
even though the background seemed properly exposed,
that's a dynamic range problem. So let's talk about how to fix those problems and
what dynamic range is. To understand dynamic range, you have to think about what
black and white are. And that seems obvious because our brain kind of
takes care of black and white for us automatically, and our cameras take care
of it automatically, too. But our cameras don't always make the right choice.
White is the very brightest part of the picture and anything in the scene that
might have been brighter than what the camera decides is absolute white is
going to be completely lost. Everything just becomes solid white,
even if there were shadows and textures in there.
Similarly, black is absolute black and anything below that point gets completely
lost.
Detail, textures and the shadows completely disappear.
So here's the problem: your brain can see about 12 to 14 stops of data between
black and white. It can see this massive amount of range,
but your camera can only see about eight stops of data, or at least in the pictures
that you typically look at there are about eight stops of contrast from black to
white.
So the way your camera handles that is, it looks at a scene and kind of picks
middle gray. What it thinks should be right in the middle between black and white.
Four stops of light below that are the shadows and four stops above that are
the highlights. That gives you that, about eight stops of dynamic range, and when
you look at the picture it looks nice and contrasty, it looks very natural.
But it's leaving out a lot of data above that white and below black that your eye
might have been able to see just fine.
So you can control how those eight stops are organized.
You could use exposure compensation to make the picture brighter, therefor
bringing up the shadows but clipping more the brightest parts of the picture.
You could use exposure compensation and dial in negative stops, making the entire
picture darker showing more of the highlights but clipping some of the
shadows.
You'll use exposure compensation up or down to decide what the most important
parts of your picture are, choosing whether to clip the highlights or to
clip the shadows. Basically deciding which part of your subject is the most
important part. And in something like a portrait, you would want the face to be
nice and brightly exposed.
What if you actually want to show more than that eight stop range?
You have two options for that. You can shoot raw. Raw images capture usually
between 11 and 14 stops of data
however when you look at the jpeg generated by that raw file, you'll
probably still just see eight stops. Shooting the raw does allow you to
adjust the exposure compensation after the fact, however. You can also adjust the
raw file to show less contrast to cram in all those 11 or 14 stops into the
final jpg file.
High dynamic range techniques take the brightest parts of the picture and kind
of shift them down, making them darker and will take the shadows and raise
them up.
This shows those details in the most extremely bright and extremely dark
parts of the picture without making the entire scene too low contrast.
You should always think about the dynamic range of your picture and how
much of that dynamic range your camera is capturing. One more factor is the noise.
The brightest parts of a picture with eight stops of dynamic range are about
256 times brighter than the darkest parts.
Now, you might not think about that, especially when you're looking at a
scene. But gathering 256 times more light means that part of the image will be
much cleaner. In the shadows, gathering 1/256 of the same light as the highlights?
You're going to be seeing a whole lot of noise because the camera simply isn't
gathering that much light.
That's why if you look closely into the shadows or you raise the exposure of
shadows, you'll often see little red blue and green speckles in there. That's that
digital noise and can be really annoying and ugly especially in very contrasty
scenes such as night photography where everything is either a shadow or a
highlight.
So to minimize that noise, I urge you to look at your histogram while you're
shooting, do what they call shooting to the right.
Make sure that the right third of the histogram has some data in it.
If you're shooting raw, you have about two stops of highlights that you'll be
able to recover later.
You might even plan to shoot a little bit to the right of your histogram,
knowing that you have a little bit of that data. I hope this video is useful, if you
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