how do avoid these type of blown-out highlights?

dandantheadminman

Hey, tough question here,

how do I avoid blown out highlights like on the picture below? I don't think its a case of over exposure as the rest of the shot is fine, maybe a tad bright but fine I think.

because that's one of the probs with the shot, as people were pointing out on the nsmb forum.

Roo · Forum Master Joined: 16 Aug 2006 Posts: 442

There is no real solution, move to an area with more shade, wait for the sun to go behind clouds, that's about it. Digitally trying to burn in detail won't work as some areas are totally white.

dandantheadminman · Posted: Fri Sep 15, 2006 3:28 pm Post subject:

thnx

yeh I had tried to do it digitally, but yeh there was no color detail there tweek, it was just white, hehe
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Hamish · Forum Veteran Joined: 29 Sep 2006 Posts: 1011

There's not much that you can do with high contrast situations unless you plan to PP.

You could intentionally expose for the highlights, so that you don't blow them, then use shadow/highlights in photoshop to pull the colours out of the shadows and keep some contrast in the midtones. Unless you clip the shadows, then there'll be detail that you can pull out. The only thing you have to be aware of is that you'll get awful noisy results if you were at a high ISO to start with.
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dandantheadminman · Posted: Fri Sep 29, 2006 5:14 pm Post subject:

o cool, thnx

yeh I'll try that out on sunday
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bluebomberx · Quite High User Joined: 01 Oct 2006 Posts: 134

The general rule of thumb for digital is expose for the highlights and post-process for the shadows. If your digicam has RAW file capability, you can process two files from the image - one for the shadows and one for the highlights. In Photoshop, you can stack the two layers and use a layer mask to blend the best of both images together.