the biggest mistake I see people make
with their portraits is they underexpose
it so use either the camera's auto
exposure which balances the foreground
in the background or they'll try to make
sure that they don't clip the highlights
that are in the background but let's
take a look at an example here's a
picture of Chelsea and you can see the
camera did a pretty good job of
balancing at the histogram is nice and
spread out we have lots of highlights
here but her face is just dark and you
you might not even notice it here's an
exercise just go in and crop it down
crop it down so you don't see any of the
background you just see the subjects
face and now when we look at it look at
the histogram obviously this is an
underexposed histogram everything is in
the left-half so what we can do is while
it's cropped let's just expose her face
but the cropping is just serving to
prevent us from being distracted from
the but with the background but the
background is the background so now that
I've exposed it for her face and I'll
just uncropped and let's look at the
before-and-after here you can see
Chelsea's face is definitely
underexposed and here it's properly
exposed it's the subject of the picture
you want it to be nice and bright
because the eye goes to the bright parts
of the image sure the background is even
brighter but the relative difference
isn't as much and the background itself
is starting to lose some detail because
it's a little blown out but that's okay
because it's the background now what if
you want that detail in the bokeh you
can still recover some of that just grab
the highlights here and drag it down
some more
but you notice this isn't changing
Chelsea's face you can see her exposure
is staying just the same so start work
from the top to the bottom get the
exposure in the face correct then drag
that highlight slider down to recover
whatever detail you might want let's
take a look at another Christy very much
better very easy to do I'm doing this in
post in Lightroom because it's easier to
demonstrate but you should do this in
camera you should think about that while
you're taking the picture of course you
Rob but don't be afraid to clip those
highlights in the background here's a
picture of my daughter Madeline classic
situation here big over cat
sky you can see I didn't clip the
highlights I managed to save all that
detail and that completely overcast sky
but that's meaningless because her face
is underexposed once again I'm going to
crop down and just kind of prove to you
how underexposed your faces look look at
the histogram here this is a little bit
of sky that's left but her face on the
left half of the histogram so let's
crank the exposure up get her face nice
and bright and properly exposed middle
gray is not something to seek out when
you're taking portraits little graves
with your camera exposes for portraits
you want them to be at least in the
right third right around there
so let's uncropped that oh there's the
reset button I was looking for that and
here we can see the before and after so
yeah I lost some of that detail in the
sky but now her face is nice and bright
and this is just a better exposure it's
kind of obvious when you look at the
before and after again if I wanted that
back going to be dimmer I could bring it
down with the highlights without
adjusting the exposure of her face
this technique doesn't just apply apply
to portraits but it can apply to
wildlife photos as well
wildlife flying birds the background is
pretty much always going to be a sky
that's brighter than your subject unless
you have backlighting which is nice here
the camera looked at this big background
and tried to expose it from middle gray
which is why the histogram is here right
in the middle but everything is just
underexposed like obviously this is
already a tight crop but if I get way in
there and I just go around the bird we
can kind of see like this here is most
of the bird's wings and this is the
bird's body and it's just an
underexposed picture so let's get back
up here and drag that exposure up make
it nice and bright you know looking at
the before and after this is more like
what it should be now here I think we
actually want some of that blue sky and
if you do want that then you can just
very gently nudge down the blues and
maybe the Aquos but don't do too much if
you do too much you're going to get
weird fringing like that see that ugly
fringing you don't want that so you just
have to be as gentle as you can possibly
be and I just illuminance down a little
bit and then you can bring the
saturation up a little bit but you
really can't overdo it the only way you
could be more extreme with that is if
you wanted to use a brush with a very
smooth kind of feathering and that's
something that I generally find to be
better done in Photoshop
thanks for watching hope that helps if
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thanks and bye