Reasons to shoot raw II: Highlight Recovery

When I switched from the Fuji S5pro to the D700 last year, I suffered from the loss of dynamic range. This, and the problem that you never see what the raw data actually is like on the camera's display lead me to using UniWB for better exposure control, and most recently I began to trust Nikon's Matrix (pattern) metering more and more, and I'm utilizing the dynamic range reserves the D700 has in the shadows, too.

Matrix metering is actually pretty good (much better than I thought) at preserving the highlights when you're shooting raw. You just have to trust it, and be careful which AF sensor you're using.

But, on to the topic - highlight recovery from raw data. For the first example below, I've chosen a rather extreme overexposure. Or rather, what seems to be a rather extreme overexposure.

Original:


Edit: -3.00 exposure correction


In the -3.00 corrected photo, you can see that there's information lost in the brightest part of the image. It is noteworthy however that it is only the color information that has been lost - the luminance information is still there. A shot like this would be perfectly usable for a black & white conversion (if it was any good, that is.)

A more reasonable approach to that type of highlight recovery is to use graduated filters in post processing to bring down an over-exposed sky while keeping the foreground unaltered. I found that I can use this to correct the exposure by 1 or maybe 1.5 stops in post processing while retaining a somewhat natural look. It's not as powerful as using real filters (where up to three stop ND grads are commonly used) - but it's far more flexible, because I can very precisely control the filter strength, gradient, and even apply other effects like toning, clarity and whatnot to it.

Original:


Edit: -1.2 stops graduated filter applied over the sky.

Raw data interpreted with Lightroom's "Camera Vivid v2" profile.

Together with the technique of using an upside down graduated filter to recover shadow detail it is possible to bring the entire tonality covered in a single raw file closer together to a more natural look, or what the human eye could see, without using HDR at all.