Adjusting Contrast on a 10D

[swansonjw]

Please excuse what might be a stupid question...I'm new to digital photography. One thing which has plagued my photos is when a scene has too much brightness difference. I've tried grad ND filters and sometimes they help. If I reduce the contrast on the 10D, does that reduce the effect of over- and under-exposure in a scene with alot of brightness difference? I've experimented with this on my 10D (less than 1 week old), but so far the scenes I've shot are still having over-exposed of underexposed areas because I guess I haven't found a scene with "some" brightness difference which overexposes at normal contrast and does not if I reduce the contrast.

[rdenney]

swansonjw wrote:
Please excuse what might be a stupid question...I'm new to digital photography. One thing which has plagued my photos is when a scene has too much brightness difference. I've tried grad ND filters and sometimes they help. If I reduce the contrast on the 10D, does that reduce the effect of over- and under-exposure in a scene with alot of brightness difference? I've experimented with this on my 10D (less than 1 week old), but so far the scenes I've shot are still having over-exposed of underexposed areas because I guess I haven't found a scene with "some" brightness difference which overexposes at normal contrast and does not if I reduce the contrast.

If you are exceeding the sensitivity of the CMOS sensor, then either some shadows will be lost, some highlights will be lost, or a little of both. This problem has been at the root of the technology of photography since its first days, and things like the Zone System were primarily concerned with how to get the values you see recorded onto the medium.

I have found with the 10D that the shadows almost always contain more information in them than I realize, but once a highlight is blown out it's gone forever. I treat it, therefore, like slide film, where I expose for the highlights. If you save the image in RAW mode, you'll get all the color depth the sensor can provide, and that will let you manipulate the tone curves in image editing software to bring up those shadow details. If you can't bring them up doing that, they were too dark to record in the first place--so just let them go black.

It could be worse; you could be shooting Velvia film and have only a little over half the tonal range of the 10D. Yet beautiful images are made on Velvia, usually by making sure the highlights have at least some tonality and letting the shadows go into a deep, rich black.

I have found that the evaluative metering actually isn't bad for making sure the highlights have some tone in them. The center-weighted metering is used by many photographers with experience, but that experience includes knowing where to point the camera to get a reading that will reel everything into the range of the sensor.

I have found that most of the images I'm getting from the 10D are a little flat, and I'm actually bumping up the contrast a bit in Photoshop. But a little lens flare does wonders for contrast (that's a joke--you can laugh).

If you shoot in RAW mode, I don't think the contrast setting will have any effect. If you shoot in JPEG mode, then your color variety is more limited, and it's important to choose which tones get recorded--that's what those controls are for. Fortunately, you can experiment on the spot and see your results.

Graduated neutral-density filters were invented for transparency shooters, to add density to the bright sky so that the darker foreground won't go black. I'm new to digital also, but I have this feeling that anything that is useful in making transparencies will be useful for digital cameras, too.

Rick "surprised by how much shadow detail is really in the RAW images" Denney