Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave
If a RAW image holds 5 stop worth of exposure, if you expose for the land you have 2.5 stops worth of exposure left for say the sky. This means from a RAW image you can open a perfectly exposed shot for the land, plus one for the sky. Using a grad layer mask you can then achieve exactly what the grad filter does, but with a lot more control plus no hassle of using filters ?
I would even go as far to say if the sky was more than 2 stops difference from land, you could underexpose original capture, to give more stops data in RAW to play with on the lighter side of the exposure ?
What do you think ?
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You are right in that the dynamic range of the shot can and usually does far exceed the +/- 2 stops of latitude that you can typically recover when using a raw image. What that doesn’t take into account is that every little bit of underexposed image that you have to drag back introduces more noise, obviously at small amounts the noise is also very small and for most of us it is unnoticeable, however you are still degrading the shot. Learning to meter correctly and set up the equipment to capture the detail without over exposing and blowing out the highlights will always result is a better shot than one which has to be manipulated at a later stage. That is why to get the absolute best results you should expose to the right to capture the most amount of data.
The other point is that noise is often much more noticeable in one specific colour channel, as a mono fanatic you will appreciate how important it is for the best quality conversions that you have noise free colour channels to work with as a base for your conversions. Black and white images are not the most forgiving when it comes to noise.