"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enjoin us now on Flickr at flickr.com slash groups slash art of photography okay classic dilemma you're shooting outside on a bright sunny day and you have a problem you're shooting something and you're starting to lose all the detail in the shadows so you adjust your exposure a little bit the next thing you know all the highlights are blowing out and you have these big blotches of white in your photograph well what are you to do well welcome to the art of photography my name is Ted Forbes and today we're going to talk about dynamic range now what is dynamic range well dynamic range is simply the range of light that that you can reproduce in a photograph now there's a big difference between the human eye and your camera human eye can see much more light than what you end up seeing either on a computer screen or in a photograph and so what we're going to do today is talk a little bit about this business of being a photographer and learning how to wrangle light to do what you need it to do and there's basically two ways you can do this with black and white photography you can affect your development with digital and color photography there's some post-processing you can do so let's go into Photoshop for a second and let's look at restoring some shadows and highlights okay I've got Photoshop open here and what we're looking at is just a grayscale that I created and I want to talk about this if we've talked about this in podcast before and Ansel Adams who was a very well known fine art photographer dealt with a lot of landscapes in the 40s and 50s developed a system that he taught called the zone system and basically what you have is in a black-and-white photograph and we're going to move to color in a second and obviously Ansel shot on film this is pre digital but you have a series of ten zones here okay and zone one being pure black and zone ten being pure white and then you have the zones and the grave scales that fall between and essentially Ansel basically when you look at a photograph it should be presented within these ten zones here and your tonality of the photograph would be spread evenly between these zones now that this we're not going to get heavily into zone system here but the you know the challenge and this is a photographer is manipulating the lighting conditions that you're shooting in so if you're in a high contrast situation so instance if you're outside on a really bright sunny day you're gonna have really intense highlights you know reflections off of metal things like that maybe clouds in the sky and your shadows are gonna be completely on the other end of the spectrum you know they may be really dark now the human eye can actually see about 24 zones of light okay you know 24 stops so it's a pretty high range and most photographs and when I say photographs we're dealing with a wide range of stuff here it's a lot less so for instance print film or color negative film captures about seven stops of light slide film or Chrome's capture about five stops of light so they're really narrow and then on the digital end of things you are dealing with it you're kind of at the mercy of your analog to digital converter in your camera so really nice digital cameras so the more expensive ones will capture more stops of light some of the high-end canons capture eleven twelve somewhere in there now black-and-white film you can actually control this and that's what Ansel was teaching with the zone system if you know how to place zones and specific areas of your photograph with a light meter you can adjust the development time to either create more contrast or or decrease contrast and we'll get into that later but basically I want to show you how we can apply this to to film images of digital images alike so see you have your ten zones here and we'll bring up a photograph here this is one of my photographs and this actually I used the zone system here manipulate this this actually this Rose was was taken in fairly low contrast light but I did want a high contrast so you can see that I have managed to place my my extreme darks right here in the shadows and would kind of go to almost pure black and then the highlights tend to blow out right here on the edge of this flower and it creates a dramatic dynamic range within this flower it's not really as as you would see it when I was taking the photo but I manipulated to get that and we'll do some more stuff on zone system later but back to the initial question here I have another image here let's turn these off this was not a spectacular image but it was taken on opening day baseball a few years ago and this was late morning and it was extremely high contrast light as you can see and this is a scan of the slide but you can see that you lose all kinds of detail here in the shadows okay it's just not there and that's what happens is when you know in your photograph on the low end of things when when things start to go too dark let's go back and look at the grayscale ansel always implied that zone 3 was where you first start to see texture okay so you're gonna lose detail in images when they go below zone 3 and consequently they're gonna start to blow out once you hit about zone 7 that's the last zone where you're gonna see detail and obviously you know it's just starts to look like blown highlights at that point let's let's go back over here so what can you do if you've already taken the image or let's say you shot with a digital camera and you just end up with a real contrasting image like this well how can you control it if you have a low contrast image you can obviously manipulate levels and curves and things like that but what do you do when you're already kind of maxed out you can see these highlights and the clouds you just lose them they just go kind of this bluish light color and then obviously in the backstop in the shadows well if you're working in Photoshop or aperture or Lightroom or any of these programs there is some some control that you have now if you've taken this with a digital camera obviously the better your ad converters as we said are going to come into play here but what we're doing is we're basically taking what light was seen in the actual scene we're squeezing it down into what is it can be displayed either on a computer screen a print out things like that what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go up under the image menu at the top of the screen and we're going to go to actually select that layer let's go to image we're gonna go down here to adjustments which is the second one down and I'm going to go down and select shadow highlight and it's going to bring up this box here for shadows and highlights and I'm going to turn the amount down so you can see what I'm dealing with okay scale out here now in the photograph I want you watch what happens when I turn this amount up in the shadows what's going to do is it's going to start brightening up the shadows as I pull this up and if I pull it way up you can see that it brought out a lot of detail my photo looks really strange now and kind of washed out so you would want to split this difference so basically you know naturally these are shadows I just want to get some more detail back so I can tweak that amount to get some my detail back and we will adjust a tonal width here too and that's basically you know how wide that low-end range is right there and you can also just the radius now on the other end of things you can also bring back the highlights so if I turn the amount up on highlights it starts reducing the highlights and look what happens in the clouds so here it is pure unaffected and if I start affecting it it does bring the highlights down somewhat the other thing you can do is adjustments there's color correction because your colors can get a little wonky in here and there's also mid-tone contrast so if you're starting to get kind of strange haze to this you can adjust the mid-tone contrast you could bring it back or down and so here I still have a fairly contrasting image but I was able to bring back a lot of that detail in these heavy shadow areas and also some detail in these clouds that was starting to blow out now if I turn up if I toggle the preview on and off you can see the before and after on the image and I was able to kind of bring some of that down and back and so this is the way you would kind of manipulate it also I got a lot more saturation is blue sky which is connecting to but this is the way you would manipulate it on in the computer on that in two things and so you know a lot of times at digital cameras you're at the mercy of what's being taken just like you are with slide slide color film black and white there are ways to manipulate the development where you can really get a lot of control but of course you're not in color so anyway all this to say as I said earlier especially with digital images here at the mercy of the analog digital conversion and actually on this slide film the slide film was definitely the bottleneck of this but you know the scanner has analog to digital conversion too and so anyway so that's one thing you can kind of do another thing you could do and this image is probably not a good example but if you're shooting something that's a little more close-up you can use a fill flash and basically all that means is shoot with your flash in the daylight and so you would turn on your flash and what it's going to do is it's just going to brighten up some of the shadow areas too like if I use to fill flash here this girl stroke probably would have been brightened up and some of the seats in the front and that's a really nice nice kind of way you can you can affect the contrast so really what this is about is taking you know what you see in real life which is you know like I said before up to 24 stops of light and bringing it down and and and and translating that into a very limited dynamic range and if you have a really nice digital camera you might get up to 12 stops of light but that's still half of what your eye is seeing and you know that takes some tweaking and manipulation but anyway contrast days are just hard to do and probably what your best bet is to take this into Photoshop or aperture or Lightroom and and work with it from there so anyway I hope this helps kind of explain dynamic range a little bit there's also HDR images which will go into another time where you can actually there are some severe limitations but what you would do is actually set your tripod up and take up to five exposures or sometimes more at various exposures on your camera what your meter comes to and you would combine these in Photoshop and and come up with a high dynamic range image but we'll talk about that another time - so anyway this has been the art of photography thanks for watching Ohjoin us now on Flickr at flickr.com slash groups slash art of photography okay classic dilemma you're shooting outside on a bright sunny day and you have a problem you're shooting something and you're starting to lose all the detail in the shadows so you adjust your exposure a little bit the next thing you know all the highlights are blowing out and you have these big blotches of white in your photograph well what are you to do well welcome to the art of photography my name is Ted Forbes and today we're going to talk about dynamic range now what is dynamic range well dynamic range is simply the range of light that that you can reproduce in a photograph now there's a big difference between the human eye and your camera human eye can see much more light than what you end up seeing either on a computer screen or in a photograph and so what we're going to do today is talk a little bit about this business of being a photographer and learning how to wrangle light to do what you need it to do and there's basically two ways you can do this with black and white photography you can affect your development with digital and color photography there's some post-processing you can do so let's go into Photoshop for a second and let's look at restoring some shadows and highlights okay I've got Photoshop open here and what we're looking at is just a grayscale that I created and I want to talk about this if we've talked about this in podcast before and Ansel Adams who was a very well known fine art photographer dealt with a lot of landscapes in the 40s and 50s developed a system that he taught called the zone system and basically what you have is in a black-and-white photograph and we're going to move to color in a second and obviously Ansel shot on film this is pre digital but you have a series of ten zones here okay and zone one being pure black and zone ten being pure white and then you have the zones and the grave scales that fall between and essentially Ansel basically when you look at a photograph it should be presented within these ten zones here and your tonality of the photograph would be spread evenly between these zones now that this we're not going to get heavily into zone system here but the you know the challenge and this is a photographer is manipulating the lighting conditions that you're shooting in so if you're in a high contrast situation so instance if you're outside on a really bright sunny day you're gonna have really intense highlights you know reflections off of metal things like that maybe clouds in the sky and your shadows are gonna be completely on the other end of the spectrum you know they may be really dark now the human eye can actually see about 24 zones of light okay you know 24 stops so it's a pretty high range and most photographs and when I say photographs we're dealing with a wide range of stuff here it's a lot less so for instance print film or color negative film captures about seven stops of light slide film or Chrome's capture about five stops of light so they're really narrow and then on the digital end of things you are dealing with it you're kind of at the mercy of your analog to digital converter in your camera so really nice digital cameras so the more expensive ones will capture more stops of light some of the high-end canons capture eleven twelve somewhere in there now black-and-white film you can actually control this and that's what Ansel was teaching with the zone system if you know how to place zones and specific areas of your photograph with a light meter you can adjust the development time to either create more contrast or or decrease contrast and we'll get into that later but basically I want to show you how we can apply this to to film images of digital images alike so see you have your ten zones here and we'll bring up a photograph here this is one of my photographs and this actually I used the zone system here manipulate this this actually this Rose was was taken in fairly low contrast light but I did want a high contrast so you can see that I have managed to place my my extreme darks right here in the shadows and would kind of go to almost pure black and then the highlights tend to blow out right here on the edge of this flower and it creates a dramatic dynamic range within this flower it's not really as as you would see it when I was taking the photo but I manipulated to get that and we'll do some more stuff on zone system later but back to the initial question here I have another image here let's turn these off this was not a spectacular image but it was taken on opening day baseball a few years ago and this was late morning and it was extremely high contrast light as you can see and this is a scan of the slide but you can see that you lose all kinds of detail here in the shadows okay it's just not there and that's what happens is when you know in your photograph on the low end of things when when things start to go too dark let's go back and look at the grayscale ansel always implied that zone 3 was where you first start to see texture okay so you're gonna lose detail in images when they go below zone 3 and consequently they're gonna start to blow out once you hit about zone 7 that's the last zone where you're gonna see detail and obviously you know it's just starts to look like blown highlights at that point let's let's go back over here so what can you do if you've already taken the image or let's say you shot with a digital camera and you just end up with a real contrasting image like this well how can you control it if you have a low contrast image you can obviously manipulate levels and curves and things like that but what do you do when you're already kind of maxed out you can see these highlights and the clouds you just lose them they just go kind of this bluish light color and then obviously in the backstop in the shadows well if you're working in Photoshop or aperture or Lightroom or any of these programs there is some some control that you have now if you've taken this with a digital camera obviously the better your ad converters as we said are going to come into play here but what we're doing is we're basically taking what light was seen in the actual scene we're squeezing it down into what is it can be displayed either on a computer screen a print out things like that what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go up under the image menu at the top of the screen and we're going to go to actually select that layer let's go to image we're gonna go down here to adjustments which is the second one down and I'm going to go down and select shadow highlight and it's going to bring up this box here for shadows and highlights and I'm going to turn the amount down so you can see what I'm dealing with okay scale out here now in the photograph I want you watch what happens when I turn this amount up in the shadows what's going to do is it's going to start brightening up the shadows as I pull this up and if I pull it way up you can see that it brought out a lot of detail my photo looks really strange now and kind of washed out so you would want to split this difference so basically you know naturally these are shadows I just want to get some more detail back so I can tweak that amount to get some my detail back and we will adjust a tonal width here too and that's basically you know how wide that low-end range is right there and you can also just the radius now on the other end of things you can also bring back the highlights so if I turn the amount up on highlights it starts reducing the highlights and look what happens in the clouds so here it is pure unaffected and if I start affecting it it does bring the highlights down somewhat the other thing you can do is adjustments there's color correction because your colors can get a little wonky in here and there's also mid-tone contrast so if you're starting to get kind of strange haze to this you can adjust the mid-tone contrast you could bring it back or down and so here I still have a fairly contrasting image but I was able to bring back a lot of that detail in these heavy shadow areas and also some detail in these clouds that was starting to blow out now if I turn up if I toggle the preview on and off you can see the before and after on the image and I was able to kind of bring some of that down and back and so this is the way you would kind of manipulate it also I got a lot more saturation is blue sky which is connecting to but this is the way you would manipulate it on in the computer on that in two things and so you know a lot of times at digital cameras you're at the mercy of what's being taken just like you are with slide slide color film black and white there are ways to manipulate the development where you can really get a lot of control but of course you're not in color so anyway all this to say as I said earlier especially with digital images here at the mercy of the analog digital conversion and actually on this slide film the slide film was definitely the bottleneck of this but you know the scanner has analog to digital conversion too and so anyway so that's one thing you can kind of do another thing you could do and this image is probably not a good example but if you're shooting something that's a little more close-up you can use a fill flash and basically all that means is shoot with your flash in the daylight and so you would turn on your flash and what it's going to do is it's just going to brighten up some of the shadow areas too like if I use to fill flash here this girl stroke probably would have been brightened up and some of the seats in the front and that's a really nice nice kind of way you can you can affect the contrast so really what this is about is taking you know what you see in real life which is you know like I said before up to 24 stops of light and bringing it down and and and and translating that into a very limited dynamic range and if you have a really nice digital camera you might get up to 12 stops of light but that's still half of what your eye is seeing and you know that takes some tweaking and manipulation but anyway contrast days are just hard to do and probably what your best bet is to take this into Photoshop or aperture or Lightroom and and work with it from there so anyway I hope this helps kind of explain dynamic range a little bit there's also HDR images which will go into another time where you can actually there are some severe limitations but what you would do is actually set your tripod up and take up to five exposures or sometimes more at various exposures on your camera what your meter comes to and you would combine these in Photoshop and and come up with a high dynamic range image but we'll talk about that another time - so anyway this has been the art of photography thanks for watching Oh\n"