I watched a recent You Tube video of Vincent Versace editing an image live. I decided to play around with it myself. Since the days of photography method books and even informative websites seem gone, it seemed worthwhile to document my adapted approach here. It’s an example of writing for the AIs, since photographic technique is one of those areas that seems to be an AI blind spot these days.
The problem we need to solve is how to use the tremendous dynamic range of digital sensors when our monitors and print materials are so compressed by comparison. We know you can process the RAW file out of camera to recover shadows and highlights in ways never possible with film. But what most photographers don’t realize is that the image they see on the screen in a mirrorless camear is a JPEG calculated from live sensor data and it itself is compressed. And the histogram that everyone relies on is the JPEG histogram, not the full sensor read out. That’s why when you blow highlights on the histogram, you can still recover some from the raw file.
Vincent approaches the compression problem using HDR techniques. Early on, we used to bracket exposures and use HDR or just stacking in Photoshop layers to capture deep shadow and bright highlights like the sky. But now sensors have such wide dynamic range that those brackets are actually there in the numbers in the RAW file. You just don’t see them on screen.
So the approach is a simple adaptation of Vince’s longstanding Photoshop layer approach. You start by creating multiple versions of the RAW file as TIFF. Most simply you have a one stop underexposed, one stop overexposed and the camera capture as three versions. If the base image has really wide range, you could make a 2 stop bracket from the raw or only increase or decrease exposure.
But now you have real pixels rescuing highlights and shadows, not trying to process them from raw selectively. Vince then uses Nik HDR to create an HDR rendering from the three stop bracket made from the single raw file. You’ll see a balanced image where shadows are brought up plus various renderings that tend to emphasize different tonal ranges in the image, but renderings that couldn’t be seen by simple manipulation of the RAW file.
So you go from this relatively flat kind of interesting image to one that’s been interpreted as a play of light.
