5D2 + 16-35 + sunny day + Lightroom : should it need this much PP?

It was a bright, sunny day, with clear blue skies today. I was mucking about checking camera/lens focusing and took this shot of the back garden using a manual "Sunny 16" exposure. Imported straight into Lightroom the initial impression was one of alarm, as the image was quite honestly a bit of a disaster. The vignetting (no filters or hood) was fierce and the exposure and overall tonal distribution was just plain wrong.

Aggressive jiggling of sliders got the image looking the way the scene looked to the naked eye, but I was shocked at just how much adjustment I had to do to make the scene look correct. Adjustments required were....

- WB to 5200, -4 from the in camera "daylight" setting of 4850,1;
- Exposure to +0.5;
- Fill light to +30;
- Blacks to 2;
- Brightness to 40;
- Vignette lens correction to +90.

Certainly it's a pretty poor SOOC result, and you have to feel sorry for JPEG shooters if this is what the 5D2 churns out when mated with "L" glass. I'm not sure how much of this is down to Lightroom, but in DPP 3.80 the results without adjustment were barely better. I'm not daft, but this just seems wrong. I wonder what other people find when using the 5D2 and 16-35 II combo.

BTW, my monitor is not calibrated, but I have calibrated it in the past and prefer to run it without calibration. As it is, the monitor will allow all the tonal blocks to be discerned on the step wedge at DPReview....

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

When you shoot on a very bright sunny day you have to think of your photo as two halves,one bright and one dark.You can't have both correctly exposed. You have to compromise as to what is more important to the scene and correct where necessary.

You've just discovered what "limited dynamic range" and "a high contrast scene" is...

mrgooch is right about the problem with sunny days. In general, I would expose to the right to the point of almost clipping the highlights and then adjust in post process. As for the issue with the vignetting, this is typical for 16mm a f/2.8. If you had shot it at a higher f-stop the vignetting wouldn't have been as much of a problem.

This is an excellent example of why shooting raw is a good idea. The in-camera JPG processor isn't that smart and will not be able to convert this nearly as well as YOU can with your eyes, especially in the area of lifting up the shadows.

Apart from the vignetting, which looks to be horrendous, my main problem is that the tone curve, both in Lightroom and in DPP seems to be completely wrong. While changing picture styles or camera profiles has a small effect, it goes nowhere near far enough to bring out the shadow detail properly. The camera has recorded the data, and it's there in the raw file, but the software is making the shadow region way darker than it should be. I can fix it. The point is, should I really have to?

To the naked eye, that fence over on the left was vastly lighter in tone than the uncorrected image suggests and there was plenty of detail visible, even when keeping the bright wall of the house well within my scope of vision. I don't understand why on default settings both DPP and Lightroom have rendered it as almost black.

FWIW, here is the uncorrected file as processed in DPP. The camera settings were essentially correct (daylight WB, "Sunny 16 exposure", neutral picture style), and IMHO it really should not have required intervention to sort out the shadows. Oh, and "daylight" WB is really not getting the job done here either.

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

If you don't like the default tone curve in Lightroom, use another default tone curve.

With raw, you're going to have to "mess with the sliders a bit", especially in difficult scenes like this.

james_in_baltimore wrote in post #9958007
mrgooch is right about the problem with sunny days. In general, I would expose to the right to the point of almost clipping the highlights and then adjust in post process. As for the issue with the vignetting, this is typical for 16mm a f/2.8. If you had shot it at a higher f-stop the vignetting wouldn't have been as much of a problem.

I fully understand ETTR technique, and use it often. If there had been something white in the scene then it would indeed have been an ETTR exposure. The absence of anything white from the scene does not make the exposure wrong. Sunny 16 on a sunny day should get the job done perfectly well. The "shadow" regions were really not as dark as the rendered images suggest. That is my issue. Sure, I can pick a new tone curve, or customise my own, but should that be necessary? I do not recall ever before (in almost four years of shooting to raw with Canon DSLRs) of having to make such wholesale corrections to the shadow regions of files - not unless there was a big exposure f-up on my part, or I was shooting into a backlit hazy/cloudy sky.

Sampling bits of the house wall in a sunlit area vs a shaded area there is a difference of about 2 stops in brightness, not much of an extreme in my view.

On a static shot like this, I would have bracketed and use the HDR function in CS4 or exposure blending in Photomatic to blend the shots and adjust as necessary. How was your metering set?

WELL! It must be the camera!

garys1 wrote in post #9958102
On a static shot like this, I would have bracketed and use the HDR function in CS4 or exposure blending in Photomatic to blend the shots and adjust as necessary. How was your metering set?

I wasn't metering at all. I set a "Sunny 16" (equivalent) exposure manually.

If I'm understanding the RGB pixel values in DPP, on a 0-255 scale the difference in incident illumination is only ~2 stops (not more) between the sunlit areas vs the shaded areas. That, to me, does not seem like a huge difference in the great scheme of things and not something that would require one to resort to HDR techniques. Sure, the shaded areas should look darker, especially if the material is of a darker tone, but there is a big difference between "looking a bit darker" as the eye perceives the scene vs "looking almost black" as the scene was rendered by the software. Maybe I'm just wrong.

Here's an unadjusted view of another shot - same settings but slightly different composition. The top end of the histogram looks pretty good, considering the absence of dazzling whites in the scene, but the shadows are sunk into deep black depression, despite the raw file having useful data available in the shadow region.

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

mrgooch wrote in post #9958108
WELL! It must be the camera!

Well it might partially be the camera, if using a sunny 16 exposure is not yielding a correct exposure with a clear, bright sun, high in the sky. Maybe for the 5D2 there should be a sunny 14 exposure guideline. I don't know. I'm just trying to determine what other people find with their 5D2 cameras.

EDIT : If DXOMark is to be believed then, for starters, it seems the 5D2 ISO sensitivity is off by about 1/3 stop at 100 ISO and as you climb through the ISO ratings the gap gradually widens. So for shooting on a sunny day the 5D2 is indeed a "Sunny 14" camera, if not "Sunny 13".

http://www.dxomark.com …base/Canon/EOS-5D-Mark-II

Your histogram is showing that you are favoring exposure to the left,leaving some room for exposure to the right.

mrgooch wrote in post #9958467
Your histogram is showing that you are favoring exposure to the left,leaving some room for exposure to the right.

Yes, I understand that, but shooting a "typical scene" on a sunny day with Sunny 16 exposure settings should be "correct", even if not optimised to maximise dynamic range. As I said earlier, if there had been some white in the scene - a person in a white shirt, for example - I would automagically have got an ETTR exposure. The lack of ETTR is not the problem here. The problem is that in fact the camera appears to be underexposing (as borne out by the ISO sensitivity data at DXOMark) and the default tone curves are doing a poor job of pulling out shadow detail from the raw data. The information is there, but being suppressed, for reasons I don't understand.

Anyway, so far I've learned that my 5D2 does need a helping hand with correct exposures, because on its own it will underexpose due to the true ISO sensitivities being lower than advertised.

Are you using a filter, even just a UV? They can cut down on some light. If not, then maybe you just have to accept that the tone curve of the 5D2 is about a stop off.