Month: March 2010

Photoshop Tutorial – Black Point

What makes a compelling photograph?  Well, there are quite a number of things and one of them is “Black point”.  But before proceeding, let’s take a quick step backwards.

Photographs look better if they utilize most of not all of the inherent dynamic range of the medium, be that paper, a computer monitor or some other electronic medium.  This is to say that the image has deep shadows, brilliant highlights and the full range of tonalities in between.   It’s the difference between a flat image and an exciting one.  Here’s a nice flat image.

kolob_canyon_flat Kolob Canyon Flat Image

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Lightroom Tutorial – Expose to the Right

For a followup post read

http://ralphnordstromphotography.com/wordpress/articles/how-to-articles/expose-revisited/

The light meters in our digital cameras don’t always give us the best exposure.  That’s not to say that they give us the wrong exposure.  But the ‘correct’ exposure doesn’t necessarily produce the best image file as far as post processing is concerned, especially if we’re shooting RAW.

If you expose an image at the exposure selected by your light meter and check the histogram, chances are it’s skewed a little to the left, toward the shadows.  This is especially apparent in low contrast scenes.  The image might look great on the camera’s LCD and in Lightroom.  But a slightly overexposed image will capture more information and is therefore better to work with later – given of course that it’s not so overexposed that you have highlight clipping.  An ideal histogram is one that is just to the right of center.  This technique is called ‘Expose to the Right,’ and is practiced by many of digital photographers.

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