Editing high dynamic range images in PhotoLab 5

You are right in both respects, apart from the cloud :crazy_face: :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: :roll_eyes:

Let’s Mike decide on that…

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I await his reaction with bated breath. But now I have to go do the weekly shopping.

Always!

I have no experience in night photography - I’m typing this as I read the review, and I’m wondering how one sets the exposure at night. Lens being wide open was because of my lack of a tripod, and out of a dozen frames, this was the only one that looked reasonably sharp. Funny, as I looked at the result on my Live-View screen, I thought the exposure was adequate. Apparently not!

The reality is worse than that - I didn’t “forget” as I didn’t really understand this, probably because of my experience with the Leica center-weighted exposures. I guess that’s why they call it “weighted”. So, I’ll continue to read, and hopefully you will explain the proper way to expose for a city-scape at night…

As of this moment, I never heard of that before…

Aha! I will try this tonight, with camera on tripod, metering as you and Helen both are suggesting. With the tripod I will go back to f/10, not wide-open.

I didn’t think I could position the “spots” well enough, as you have suggested a large area for each, so I didn’t try. Finding a large dark area is easy. I wasn’t sure what to do for a large enough “bright” area though. I’ll try that again, possibly this evening.

At the time, yes. I wasn’t sure what to do, and I turned that setting on and off, mostly liking what it did. I didn’t understand how to use the selectivity. I’m still very “rough” at using Control Lines. …and while I agree those huge fluffy over-bright clouds are “distracting”, I think I wold rather tone them down than eliminate them. To me, without them, the photo starts to look “boring”. I do like the way you brought out the “shrubbery on the islands” - I never even thought to do that.

While the end result is technically improved, the cropping removes the reason that I even took the photo, the sky. Had it not been for the sky, I would’t have grabbed my camera an tried to capture the scene. I now know how to improve things, thanks to what you’ve written, but this was a very unusual sky, and that was the reason for what I included, and excluded, from the photo.

Something I wanted to do, but couldn’t, was to show the blimp better. I guess instead of having dinner, I should have spent the time on my balcony, with tripod. Daylight Savings Time ends soon, and instead of the sunset being around 7pm, it will be around 8pm. That should make it easier for me to capture another similar image, trying to incorporate your (and Helen’s) suggestions.

Mike’s thought is that without the full sky, there was no reason to have taken the photo. I think toning down the cloud so it isn’t so prominent might be best.

Had it not been for the cloud, I’d have. zoomed in a lot closer, keeping the city, but cutting off the left side of the image, which would make the image more “balanced”.

I’ve got a list of changes to do on my next attempt. My biggest puzzle is how to set the exposure, but I will try it as Helen suggested. My gut feeling is the image will be very under-exposed, but maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

In the extremely unlikely chance that those huge clouds, lit up by the city, re-appear, maybe I’ll remove more from the top of the image. I think it’s fascinating to look at this, or any, scene, both through my eyes, and all of your eyes. The reason I took the photo is the sky.

I woke up for a glass of water a few nights ago, glanced out my window, and even though it was the middle of the night, I saw this fascinating view. I went out on my balcony with the iPhone to capture it, then went back to sleep. I haven’t tried to edit it, and in fact, haven’t even checked it out until just now:

I almost thought of grabbing my real camera gear and capturing the scene better, but I just crawled back into bed…

(It’s an older iPhone 11Pro, with three lenses. It’s a long exposure, thus the flat water. Phone was resting on my balcony railing. Maybe I’ll see what PL5 can do with it, if PL5 even recognizes this as an iPhone photo. I think I can use an app to take raw photos from the iPhone, but never tried…)

Yes you have, it’s just like dusk photography but later :nerd_face:

Set the compensation to +2 EV and measure for the brightest lights you can find. in this case, the funnel on the cruise liner was blown to smithereens and would have been an excellent target but compensated at only +1 EV to make sure that the blue wasn’t burnt out.

The idea of the compensation is to place the lights somewhere between 0 EV and +2 EV, depending on how bright a white you want it to appear.

Have you lost that nice new tripod already? :roll_eyes:

Never judge exposure on the Live View screen. It is based on a JPEG rendering constructed by the camera.

Yup.

Are you sure about that? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Don’t forget to do your metering before you finally put the camera on the tripod in case the brightest lights are not in shot.

That’s because you were using HEZM (human eye zoom mode) when you were looking at the scene. You know, that mode where your eye zooms into an object and your brain tries to convince you that it really can look bigger and more detailed than the dozen or so pixels you really know it will end up being in the final shot :crazy_face:

Nah! Just pick up all your other camera gear and throw it into the Bay. Why bother with all that complicated calculation and post-processing stuff when Apple can do it all for you?

The only trouble is, I can’t decide whether I’m being serious about that or not :smiley: :rofl: :grin: :nerd_face:

On the other hand, it didn’t take much to get somewhere near the iPhone look and feel - even the blimp is more obvious…

I will take your word for it. I ought to have tried it anyway, taking a spot meter reading on the cruise ship funnel, along with the +2 EV. Maybe if I wasn’t rushing, I’d have tried that anyway? I don’t think that fast “under pressure”.

Had I stopped to get the tripod set up, I thought the lighting I enjoyed so much would be lost. Ansel Adams has me taking a photo first, before thinking about what I’m doing too much, to get one image “in the bag”, and then thinking about how to optimize it. Totally my fault - I could have gone out to the balcony much earlier, but I didn’t expect to find something I liked so much. Tripod is now set up, by my balcony, and I will have mounted the “mounting plate” to my D750 within the hour.

I have been using the image review screen as a guide for as long as I’ve owned the D750. I suppose I can end that forever by turning off “image review” as I do much of the time on my Leica M10. In my mind, maybe I need to change, is that the image review is a guide to my basic image settings, but with RAW I have a huge range to go beyond those settings. On your 850, do you turn off Image Review? I guess if I did a lot more work again with a view camera, that would break me of this habit.

No, I’m not. Worse than that. My fault - my mind is now “corrupted” from using my Leica, and center-weighted on the Leica excludes everything else. Not so with Nikon. And yes, you probably did explain this, but old habits are sometimes hard to break. When I was selecting center-weighted, I had lost track of how Nikon does this, and my mental image of what is being measured is the image I posted here a while back for the Leica. Along with other things, I’d like to think this mistake won’t happen again.

It’s about time I learned how to store a setting on my D750. I will do this later today, as user setting #1, and hopefully I can give it a name that will remind me what it does.

Sort of, but I lost track of the blimp myself, and only found it again in PL5 while viewing the image at 100%. You’re right of course, and I probably should have taken out my 2000mm mirror lens that I don’t own, and taken a photo of the blimp when it was in front of Miami, before it got so dark… Of course, if I did have that lens, I could take good shots of the moon, something else I want to do, but can’t (yet).

Gosh, you were very effective at turning the D750 image into something that looks like what my iPhone might have done! You’ve got the “look and feel”. And, you’ve got the blimp! I ought to rush off to the Apple store, and get their latest.

Back to reality. As usual, thank you for a full explanation of so many things that are wobbling around in my brain, and pointing to settings that might make for some major improvements. Step number one is to get the right stating point, creating a setting to automatically configure my camera much closer to what I need for this kind of photography, and a list of other things I need to verify, such as (M)anual mode, f/10, center-weighted, and exposure compensation. Next is to attach the mounting plate from my tripod to the D750. (It took forever to figure out how the mounting plate goes on and off the tripod - now I think it will be effortless.)

Interesting that I agree 100% with the technical things you, Wolfgang, Platypus, and others suggest, but we often differ on composition. I no longer think there is a “right” or “wrong” about composition, just different interpretations. We all “see” things differently. For example, this latest photo - the sky is the only reason why I took the photo at all, and because I didn’t check often enough, by the time I decided to go for it, it was already a little too late. The rest of the photo, meaning Miami, the cruise ships, and the boats in the water, is something I can take almost any day of the week, and if it stops raining and clears up, I will try to do that this evening, if for no other reason than to use the new tools and techniques that I have learned about.

I’ve been reading the book I bought about the D750, and the description of the differences between “spot metering” and “highlight weighted metering” which selects the brightest part of the image automatically.

Joanna, if your D850 has both, given the choice, which is more appropriate for this kind of photo? If I use “highlight weighted” and +1.7 EV, shouldn’t this effectively work the same as spot metering on the sun area, and using +1.7 EV ?

https://www.nikonusa.com/en/learn-and-explore/a/products-and-innovation/using-the-highlight-weighted-metering-mode.html

…that’s something that needs testing instead of guessing or believing: Clamp your camera safely and take a shot with each of the settings in rapid succession - to minimise changes in lighting conditions.

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Absolutely.

Talking of which, we’ve just been out to a little port near here called Perros Guirec, with the express aim of taking night shots.

First, let me say, you will have to excuse my being an idiot and forgetting to turn the ISO down from 1000 to 100 ISO :roll_eyes:

Nonetheless, here is s shot spot metered on the brightest light +1.7 EV…

And here is one centre-weighted -3EV…

Which just goes to prove that there is no one way of doing this kind of photography and, apart from not forgetting to get the ISO right, the choice of metering is often down to experience, which is often the result of experimenting and getting it wrong a lot of times before it finally becomes a bit more automatic.


Addenda

And one last one from another small port called Locquirec, that we visited around sunset. it’s not quite as big as your port :nerd_face:

Thank you @Joanna and others for all of the wonderful advice and tutorials you provide. I have been following much of the advice you have been giving @mikemyers for some time. Never think that you are helping just a single person; I feel certain there are plenty more lurkers like me.

I do have a question related to the quote I posted in. I shoot with an Olympus E-m1 ii, it has the ability to adjust the histogram end points. Also you can adjust the jpeg settings, sharpness, contrast, etc. (I only use the raw file so the jpeg adjustment wouldn’t impact me). So my question is: is there a way, using these adjustments, to make the histogram and exposure warnings more closely represent the raw file? I would love to have “blinkies” (red highlights with Olympus) that actually indicate clipping is occurring in the raw file.

Again, thanks to everyone for all of the help provided here.

About the ISO - you are just proving you are human.

Top photo looks dark.

Middle photo looks like an available light photo, but the lighting looks strange.

Third photo looks like something you and/or Helen could spend a lot of time on, perfecting it. So beautiful, but you didn’t post the image file to let us play with it??? :frowning:

Yes, there is. It’s called UniWB.

UniWB means that all multipliers are set to an equal value, in case of Canon cameras, it’s 1024…

How to set UniWB (on select cameras)

  1. Point your camera to an evenly lit bright surface (not the sun!) and take shot that is really overexposed.
  2. Take a manual WB from the overexposed shot and save this setting for future use.

Notes:

  • Not all cameras will WB from a blown exposure, some may tell you that it’s not going to be okay, but do it anyway. The screenshot shows a UniWB setting of an EOS 5DIII, the blue level is slightly off, but anything within a few % should work just fine.
  • OOC jpegs and the image on the back screen will have a terrible green tint. Trash the OOC jpegs and WB your shots in post.
  • The checker pattern shows a part of the image at 1000% zoom
  • Google “UniWB” for more background info.

That’s possibly because it is dark there. Perros Guirec only has a population of around 7000 people and street lighting is relatively low powered. When night falls around our house, unless the moon is out, you need a torch to see where you are going.

That’s just the colour of the street lighting taken with a WB of 5600ºK.

Actually, it only took a couple of tweaks with Smart Lighting and the tone curve. Unfortunately, I can’t post 45Mpx RAW files here - sorry :slightly_frowning_face:

This may be the way to do that on my Nikon D750 - not sure if want to change the camera this way though…
https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?p=17474375

It’s just an extra custom white balance setting that you can use under difficult conditions e.g. when it is hard to find the brightest part of the image.
GUILLERMO LUIJK >> TUTORIALS >> UNIWB. MAKE CAMERA DISPLAY RELIABLE even delivers a file for the D750.

I’m sorry @Todd but, as much as I respect whoever dreamt up this stuff, when you’ve got a tool like DxO PL to take care of minor differences in WB, why bother going to all this trouble?

But if WB really matters that much, get yourself a Great Macbeth colour chart and photograph that in the same light as the required shot, then adjust the WB from there in post-processing.

Oh, and…

… in fact, as we’ve been discussing in this and other threads, get to know your camera better and then you can totally ignore the screen on the back of the camera :grin:

Mike - how many years have you been taking pictures? Take it from one old pro to another - ignore this, set your Picture Control to Flat, and carry on taking the great pictures you’ve always been taking. :sunglasses:

Agreed, if you have learnt how your camera behaves, you’ll need no exposure meter and, btw, real men don’t wear gloves in Antarctica…

Not sorry for the sarcasm. Why not use available tools to ease/better things? After all, we’ve stopped to cook food on an open fire and we take pictures instead of hammering them onto a stone wall…

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:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Of course. It’s just that I believe Mike already has all he needs to turn out excellent pictures and, for the effort involved, I don’t think it will be of sufficient value to him. If I get confused with all this stuff, I’m darned sure Mike will :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: :sunglasses:

It has been said so often, when capturing in raw-file format

  • set Colour space to AdobeRGB
  • set Picture Style etc to flat / neutral
  • switch off things like Active D-Lighting (in Nikon speech)

to ensure the least effect / influence on the camera’s metering system.


(ed)

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