Just a Simple Question About Dynamic Range

Yes but this is not slide film. Although it might look the same at first glance. Maybe it's because I am using older bodies and so have to work harder to get results that match the newer technology. With the latest version Process 2012 that is in Adobe's latest RAW converters there is so much retained highlight detail that ETTR really really now makes so much difference. If I do not need to push any part of a scene, and am pulling most of the tones, then the noise levels at even ISO800 are amazing. However any need to push anything even at ISO 100 and wham I now need to use noise reduction. I admit it is really only since the new controls in LR/ACR that this has worked so well.

Shooting to the left a bit may help if you are shooting JPEG in camera, and you have too much DR to get into an 8 bit file. The thing is as AMATURE photographers the situations where we should be doing that are rare. By shooting to the left we are always courting the need to boost shadows and thus introduce noise in to the image. Shoot RAW, ETTR and try Adobe Process 2012 would be my advice to any keen amature photographer. Especially if you are using an older body. BTW I am shooting with both a 300D (with cracked 10D firmware) and a 20D at the moment.

Alan

BigAl007 wrote in post #15053904
Yes but this is not slide film. Although it might look the same at first glance. Maybe it's because I am using older bodies and so have to work harder to get results that match the newer technology... BTW I am shooting with both a 300D (with cracked 10D firmware) and a 20D at the moment.

Alan

You are correct.... Digital has about the same dynamic range as slide film. Most negative films offered a little more DR, so a little more exposure latitude than either slides or digital.

However, when it comes to exposure it's just the opposite, digital is more like negative film. Underexposure is more risky than slight overexposure. The reason is simple.... In the case of digital and negative film, the shadows are a lack of information (whether it's data or analog), while highlights are an overabundance of information. With slide film it's exactly the opposite... the lightest areas are those with the least information while the shadows are so crowded with information as to block all light from passing through the film.

So with slide film if you want to retain some detail in the highlights you have to be very careful about accidental overexposure, you're better off slightly underexposing. With both neg film and digital it's the opposite... you are safer slightly overexposing because there is recoverable detail in the highlights and you have to be careful not to lose detail in the shadows. Also with digital, pulling back or reducing exposure from slight overexposure is better than doing the opposite... Increasing exposure in post production amps up image noise, especially in shadow areas.

Using 300D and 20D, you'll run into some limitations. Those are both 12 bit cameras. All Canon models from the 40D onward are 14 bit and capture much more color data. It's only two additional channels of data, but the amount of color data recorded is exponentially greater!

Reading through this post and the responses, I'm struck by several things...

For one, dynamic range and the final image are to some extent subject to the eye of the beholder. For example, here is your original image and how you processed it...

"......However, when it comes to exposure it's just the opposite, digital is more like negative film. Underexposure is more risky than slight overexposure. The reason is simple.... In the case of digital and negative film, the shadows are a lack of information (whether it's data or analog), while highlights are an overabundance of information. With slide film it's exactly the opposite... the lightest areas are those with the least information while the shadows are so crowded with information as to block all light from passing through the film....."

In negative film a bright light makes a dark area, thats not a lack of information, its too much. An unexposed negative would be a clear piece of film when developed. On a slide film its exactly the opposite, unexposed film would be dark once developed. So under exposure would effectively darken and enrich a slide film but leave a negative film washed out.

Of course the negative was then printed, reversing the whole image. So the resulting print will lead some to believe the reverse.

Lowner wrote in post #15054866
"......However, when it comes to exposure it's just the opposite, digital is more like negative film. Underexposure is more risky than slight overexposure. The reason is simple.... In the case of digital and negative film, the shadows are a lack of information (whether it's data or analog), while highlights are an overabundance of information. With slide film it's exactly the opposite... the lightest areas are those with the least information while the shadows are so crowded with information as to block all light from passing through the film....."

In negative film a bright light makes a dark area, thats not a lack of information, its too much. An unexposed negative would be a clear piece of film when developed. On a slide film its exactly the opposite, unexposed film would be dark once developed. So under exposure would effectively darken and enrich a slide film but leave a negative film washed out.

Of course the negative was then printed, reversing the whole image. So the resulting print will lead some to believe the reverse.

Please reread what I wrote. I think you'll see that we agree.

I didn't get into printing a neg any more than making a print from a slide, since in either case it's an additional exposure and would just confuse the issue. I was simply discussing the initial exposure of the film itself or the digital sensor.

My point was that while dynamic range of transparency or slide film and digital is similar, the way you handled exposure for each is not.

With slides it's best to err sligthly toward underexposure, to avoid overexposure, in order to protect the highlights.

With both negative film and digital it's best to err slighty toward overexposure, to avoid underexposure. But it's for different reasons. In the case of neg film it's to protect detail in the shadows. In the case of digital it's to avoid amping up noise, which tends to be most noticeable in the shadows.

My reason for mentioning and trying to explain this was because the OP seemed to be tending to do just the opposite, seems to me to be overly concerned about "blowing out the highlights". Sure, you have to be careful not to go too far, but 1/3, 1/2 even 2/3 stop overexposure is usually easily recoverable... While that much underexposure might ruin a shot. (Though it depends on the camera, ISO and possibly some other factors, too.)

Interesting topic. The other day, I did an edit on the original image for the heck of it and came up with a result that seems to show plenty of detail without blowouts in the yellows...on my monitor. The biggest change I made was in white balance and contrast. By keeping the background darker, it makes the flower relatively brighter by comparison.

Here's the edit I did the other day. I just didn't bother to post it until now. It's a bit oversharpened.

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

John from PA wrote in post #15053593
The tip in the link I provided reads

Picking this apart, especially if you are familiar with the zone system, you will find that healthy green grass is a near perfect equivalent to an 18% gray card. The slight underexposure then assures the details don't suffer by being blown out (once gone, not recoverable). The OP if he is really into macro flower photography should also consider an ExpoDisk (instructions attached). It works well although I find it best on very small objects.

^- Yep, If i remember correctly Bryan Peterson went over this tip in Understanding Exposure (Which i think everyone needs to read)

Also i love you guys edits on those.. amfoto, i only have lightroom so i cant get into doing layers/stuff like that usually.. I can probubly achieve something similar.. Lets see...

Heres attempt number 2, Taking your criticisms into account and some inspiration from both of you:

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …unetsukiphoto/8​034244373/

Lowner wrote in post #15049579
You are talking about the actual DR of a scene. Thats got nothing at all to do with the the DR that the camera captures. And you and I both know how to manipulate captured tones in camera so don't get cute.

You have shown me an image that looks VERY low contrast. Thats NOT high DR to me.

The problem here is that it appears you're using "dynamic range" to mean the range of tones in the output. But that's not what is generally meant by dynamic range as regards what the camera captures.

Dynamic range is the range of light intensities captured by the camera. You simply cannot look at a photo and determine the dynamic range of a camera from it without having actually been at the scene and having measured the light intensities within it.

When you take a photograph with your camera, what you generally see in the output is a 5 to 6 stop window into the dynamic range of the camera. What the camera captures is a superset of what you can actually see at any one time with any given output device unless you throw data away (compress the dynamic range captured by the camera into the dynamic range space of the output device). Even the best generally-available monitors only have an output dynamic range of about 10 stops (the ratio of the highest intensity displayable to the lowest intensity displayable). Prints generally have much less dynamic range than that.

You would never know a 12 stop dynamic range shot if you saw it unless you were actually at the scene at the time the shot was taken and saw, with your own eyes (or, rather, with a light meter), the light intensities involved. The final output tells you nothing about the light intensities that formed the input. This is trivially illustrated with well-done HDR photographs. Done properly, you would never know that the final image was the product of the HDR process.

Lowner wrote in post #15053047
Thanks for the reply. But thats basically what the pro landscape 'tog and I were playing with when we agreed we were seeing 5 stops. This was on a very bright day with hard shadows and white cloud. What software can achieve subsequently is an entirely different story,

No, it is not an entirely different story. Not at all. The software is only able to operate on the data that is available to it. It cannot operate on information that is not present in the original capture. The fact that you can pull detail out of the shadows and out of the highlights (at the same time, no less) is proof that the dynamic range captured by your camera is greater than you give it credit for. Now, it may be that only 5 stops of that dynamic range is what you'd consider to be useful, but that is a matter of preference. The camera still captured the light, even if you choose not to make use of it.

KenjiS, I think you need that dark ring. That's what helps give your flower depth and shape. A common mistake I see in hdr images is no depth. There are no highlights blown but there are no dark shadows either so the image winds up just looking flat and 2 dimensional.

navydoc wrote in post #15056479
KenjiS, I think you need that dark ring. That's what helps give your flower depth and shape. A common mistake I see in hdr images is no depth. There are no highlights blown but there are no dark shadows either so the image winds up just looking flat and 2 dimensional.

Fair enough, its kinda growing on me...

The first edit... i actually looked at it again today and went "what was i thinking" I think i was trying so hard to do something "different" that i neglected to make it -good- in the process...

I really like the second edit i did..i think it looks very good now... I wish i had ink for my printer, itd look great on the wall

amfoto1 wrote in post #15055167
Please reread what I wrote. I think you'll see that we agree.

My apologies, I obviously misunderstood, but it still reads to me exactly the opposite!

Lowner wrote in post #15053047
Thanks for the reply. But thats basically what the pro landscape 'tog and I were playing with when we agreed we were seeing 5 stops. This was on a very bright day with hard shadows and white cloud. What software can achieve subsequently is an entirely different story, my complaint is with the manufacturers (not just Canon) using artificial lab tests to claim completely artificial DR figures. But you are falling into the same trap that Elie fell into. Just because Photoshop does not read 0,0,0 or 255,255,255 does not mean that whats left is usable in the field, and thats all I'm interested in. So it reads 8,10,6 or 250,252,249 simply because we guessed at a hilight or shadow does not disprove what we found.

I did see some superb results shown here from the new Nikon D800E. Still not 11/12 stops, and after processing I seem to remember so a bit suspect. But at first glance it was the best dynamic range I've seen to date.

What does software have to do with it? If any information at all is captured outside that 5 stops you claim, then the DR is wider than 5 stops. If the software isn't using it, that doesn't men the camera didn't capture it. But if you can recover anything at all in the highlights or the shadows, then you have proved that the camera did indeed capture beyond the 5 stops.

Remember that I keep coming back to that magic word "usable", particularly usable out shooting, not sat at the computer. OK, I'll accept that we regularly play with blending images, tweaking levels and all the rest to achieve more than 5 stops in a finished image. But I repeat, all I see when I'm out with my 5DII is 5 stops. And to have that confirmed by a good pro landscape 'tog just added that much more certainty to my own experience.

The minor differences in figures I invented were to make a point, the differences are so minor that what do you want me to admit, that its actually 5.0001 stops range not 5? As I say, its usable range I'm interested in and that is NOT 11 or 12 stops in my own experience.

Lowner wrote in post #15060038
Remember that I keep coming back to that magic word "usable", particularly usable out shooting, not sat at the computer. OK, I'll accept that we regularly play with blending images, tweaking levels and all the rest to achieve more than 5 stops in a finished image. But I repeat, all I see when I'm out with my 5DII is 5 stops. And to have that confirmed by a good pro landscape 'tog just added that much more certainty to my own experience.

The minor differences in figures I invented were to make a point, the differences are so minor that what do you want me to admit, that its actually 5.0001 stops range not 5? As I say, its usable range I'm interested in and that is NOT 11 or 12 stops in my own experience.

It sounds like your standard of usability is, essentially, noise-free. If that's the case then yes, I agree, you're not likely to get more than 5 stops of usable dynamic range from the 5D2 or, really, just about any other camera out there.

But that's not what the manufacturers or testers mean when they talk about dynamic range. What they mean by that is the range of light intensities that result in a signal that is distinguishable at all from the background noise. Which is to say, the figures they publish are for the maximum dynamic range that can possibly be used at all. If one's own personal standards are more strict than that then that's fine, of course, but it does not change the fact that the camera is recording a distinguishable signal over a much wider dynamic range than what you appear to be using in your final output.

Nobody says that you have to use the entire dynamic range that the camera is capable of delivering, and that's as it should be -- we all have our own standards of acceptability. Because we all have our own such standards, the only thing the testers can do is give you a figure that is based on objective and non-arbitrary criteria. It's up to you to determine how much of that is usable for your purposes.