Shooting in a situation where you can't use a flash, can't bracket exposures, and can't take time to chimp around?
Here is how I take compromise exposure from the field and apply the full might of todays Post Procession tools to create as close to an ideal exposure as I can.
This was a shot of darker skinned subjects, in direct sunlight, covered with spotty foliage. The result are some spots of blazing hot highlights and large areas of very dark shadows. At the time I got one shot, and a flash was not an option, as was handholding a 3 image bracketed exposure of living subjects.
RAW. This is the zereoed out RAW file.
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Step 1, Crop out the upper part of the frame to 8x10 format.
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Step 2, identify my goal midtone exposure and adjust to match. It was +1 EV in this case.
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Step 3, Duplicate version and drop exposure to -2 EV to get highlight detail. I don't like the "recovery" function, because it takes away some of the pop and contrast, basically compressing the highlights.
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Step 4, Using my midtone-correct exposure as the example, I applied basic color temperature correction for the shade, added some saturation (Vibrance) to the shadows, and did some dodging and burning to focus the viewers attention, as well as restore the vignette that was lost when I cropped in from the original. I stamped these adjustments onto each of the 3 versions, the original, midtone corrected, and highlight corrected.
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Step 5, the blending of the 3 exposures. Using luminance masks, with some feathering to focus on only the blown areas, I brushed in the reduced exposures in the highlight areas. This gave some detail back, but more importantly, it reduced the severity of how they distract from the faces. I increased saturation, by area, and by channel, in order to set myself up to do a B&W conversion and use channels to simulate filters.
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Step 6, using Silver-Efx pro, I did a B&W conversion, using a simulated red filter to hold their skin tones while I dropped down some of the background and clutter. ALso, for simply my styles sake, I did a very slight paper/ink tone and burned the edges.
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