MAKE EXPOSURE ADJUSTMENTS
When in front of an amazing subject, capturing the best exposure becomes incredibly important
Modern cameras are incredibly good at capturing detail across a huge dynamic range, but this detail can be hidden within the RAW file or, in extreme cases, you may need to bracket your exposures in order to record detail satisfactorily. However you choose to work, to create images with impact you need to provide detail where it is needed. You can have images with bald white skies or jet black shadows if this is your style, but you’ll still need to retain detail in the areas that matter.
With modern cameras and RAW processing apps capable of capturing and retaining such a wide range of tones, the temptation is to capture everything you need in a single exposure. You can use highlight and shadow sliders to retain detail globally, throughout the image. Technically, it’s a great solution, but aesthetically it might not be what you want.
Editing together two different exposures, or the same file processed with two different exposures, allows us to control the exposure selectively, not globally. In the photograph below of Milford Sound in New Zealand, globally controlling the highlights would have darkened down both the sky and the reflection in the water, yet the key to the photograph’s impact is the reflection! If that’s darkened down, the photo doesn’t have as much impact.
So, rather than processing the file globally, the choice was to process the foreground independently of the sky, controlling the exposures separately.
We all know there is more than one way to edit a file, and you would be correct in thinking that you could still process this file globally and then edit selectively afterwards. However, applying too much shadow and highlight control in processing makes fundamental changes to the image’s tonality, and you may find that processing different areas separately produces a superior result.