Shooting for Highlight, the best Advanced Photography Tip for Digital Photographers

“Digital Photography can be as easy as just “point and shoot”, then preview the image and if you don’t like it, delete the photo.”  Most people probably use their digital cameras (or Smartphones) like this. Digital cameras in general are very powerful tools. That is why there is more to digital photography rather than just “point and click”. One of the most important part of Digital Photography is “Post Processing”. This Advanced Photography Tip will change your photography workflow to better image capturing.

What is Post Processing?

The term Post Processing (or postproc for short) or editing is used in the video/film business for quality-improvement image processing (specifically digital image processing) methods used in digital photography or videography.

All digital cameras have some weaknesses and generally speaking post processing means to apply certain types of editing to enhance the image quality and/or to compensate for the camera or lens imperfection.

One of the most common flaws in almost all digital cameras is Highlight Clipping.

What is Highlight Clipping?

Digital cameras can not handle the strong highlights, therefore the bright part of the image usually is “Burnt Out”, which means there is not enough information (Data) on those area to bring back the details.

In above example it is next to impossible to restore any data from the clipped highlight. No editing software or techniques can save this type of photos.

Here it comes our Advanced Photography Tip for this week:

To compensate this flaw in digital photography, pro photographers set the exposure for the highlights and take the pictures. Then during the post processing they can easily adjust the shadows and bring out more details.

This picture looks way underexposed, and you would probably delete it! But after a little editing on shadows and and simple adjustment on Levels you can see the improvement.

As it was mentioned digital cameras can not handle data from the highlights of the scene, but they maintain data from shadows. Here is an example of a normal exposed photos that I tried to restore the details of the sky.

Not really provided that you find right instructor who teaches you how to use the tools in a software. In our Lightroom program Start to Finish, I will guide you through Lightroom tools and adjustments.