Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/01/18
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 11:45 PM 17/01/99 -0800, Jim wrote: >This discussion is about transparency film. If you "blow out" the >highlights by too much exposure, they are unrecoverable. It's clear film. >On the other hand, if the highlights show detail, and the shadows are dark, >that's acceptable. And sometimes, with masks or photoshop, you can find >some detail in the shadows. It's not clear film and there could be some >image there. You never want to lose the highlights. Nothing worse than an >overexposed slide. Underexposed slides are acceptable and many times >recoverable. > I'm not into computer manipulation of images, but for those who are, you might want to consider taking two, or perhaps three shots of the same scene, with the camera tripod mounted, over a range of exposure settings if the scene contrast exceeds the film's exposure latitude. You might then be able to make a composite image from these, with detail in the shadows, midtones, and highlights. For those who use photoshop regularly, perhaps you might want to comment on the possibility of doing this to record detail over a wider exposure range than the film can handle. It would be a lot of work to put the final composite image together, but if it something important which requires good detail over a wide contrast range on slide film, this might be a way to compress the scene contrast in a way that it can be handled by slide film. Perhaps the resulting image may not look convincingly realistic, but at least you would not end up either with silhouetted shadows or blown out highlights.