Even on overcast days when the lighting is soft and diffused, contrast can be a problem. For example, this awesome view of a portion of Iguazu Falls on the Brazil side had to be manipulated in Adobe Camera Raw (or Lightroom) to open up the shadows particularly in the green foliage. The original digital capture underexposed the trees because the white water of the falls influenced the meter reading such that the water was exposed well but the shadows became too dark. Of course. on a sunny day this kind of thing is a familar problem, but you need to be aware that under a dense cloud cover the same problem can persist, although it's not as intense of a problem as when shooting under direct sunlight. I used the shadows slider in ACR to recover the lost detail in the darker portions of the image.
The settings for this picture were: 1/5000th of a second, f/5, 320 ISO, and I used a 14mm wide angle lens.
1 Comments
Feb 7, 2015, 3:09:59 PM
Michele - Hi Jim,
When you open up shadows to bring out the detail and proper color in a photo, ex: the tree in your photo, how did you handle the noise it creates when doing this type of adjustment? In my experience that seems to be an issue, so it never comes out attractive like yours did here. Thank you.