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ctfchallenge | all galleries >> Challenge 149 - Breaking the Rules >> Challenge 149 - Pending > Morning Textures
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23-DEC-2007 John Prichard

Morning Textures

My Bedroom, Allen, Tx

Rule: Don't bother trying to capture a dark image against a highly bright image. You must make a choice to either expose for one or the other or make several photographs and try to combine them later.

This image had a very bright sun shade and a very dark curtain but this image was still possible with out having to sacrifice either. You can capture a dark image against a highly bright image by capturing your CCD values in a RAW file and later process the RAW file to get two or more "negatives" (positives) that you can stack in Photoshop. This is not an HDR and it is not bracketed. See further explanation starting from the bottom of Comments below.

Canon PowerShot G9
1/320s f/4.0 at 22.0mm iso80 full exif

other sizes: small medium original auto
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ctfchallenge26-Dec-2007 16:45
Qualified. ~ Lonnit
ctfchallenge24-Dec-2007 19:09
Unqualified. You stated the rule and explained that you shouldn't break it b/c the image doesn't work. This challenge requires explaining why the image DOES work. ~ Lonnit
Rod 23-Dec-2007 20:41
Very interesting John & thanks for doing this. I've put this picy & one I dodged & burnt in Pending so we can compare more easily. I would be interested to see what someone good in PS can do with your original Jpeg. I have to go out now but will get back to this later. Thanks mate:-)
ctfchallenge23-Dec-2007 18:28
PS. I have thrown away the 4000 x 3000 which also showed (if you viewed at 100%) the weave of the shade but did keep a bicubic sharp of 2000 x 1500 which shows the surface of the curtain (bigger weave) and the delicate screen shadow in the lower part. Available on request. Think I will keep the raw CCD collection since I can quickly reproduce the 3 negatives and I could make a picture from just the lower screen --- a little brighter perhaps --- its all in there, waiting. John
ctfchallenge23-Dec-2007 18:18
One more thing. I did set the color temperature and tint in my negative since the camera was completely wrong about the color of shade pull or the color of my curtains or even the color of my shades.

I tried to recover even a fraction of this nuance in the jpeg that the camera decided at the same time. I know it didn't have a chance and I am being unfair since I forced it into such a poor exposure to decide from. However, I manipulated the jpeg for a half hour, even going so far as to use layer masks to see if I could isolate the two areas since they are easily isolated in the picture (what if the brights were poking through the darks like a back lit grate) but I really didn't get close to this image. The image I almost saw with my own eyes except for the shade pull, the surface texture of the curtain, the screen shadow against the shade and detail in the edge of the window both in the highlight and in the shadowed highlight. John
ctfchallenge23-Dec-2007 17:40
So I will put the camera chosen jpeg in pending for a comparison. Now realize that I did choose to underexpose so that the values in the raw would not be all ones for the bright colors. The fact is you do have to have the camera not blow any hightlights that you want. Although it is hard to see in this lower resolution image, you can see most of the detail in the plaster along the window edge. The blown spot is adjacent to the shade pull and slightly above. Everything else is 4096 shades down from that.

When you first use the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in of CS3 or Adobe Bridge, you immediately get a 256 value representation of what is in the file that is centered at the exposure you chose, along with the recommendation of temperature and tint. You can move the slider up or down 4 stops. Of course, if you shot your exposure on the edge of the light range then going one way yields information and going the other just yields all ones (more blown image). So I slide the exposure slider 4 whole stops into the value file to pull out just the details in the black and shift-clicked the open image in photoshop button. This immediately put a new "smart" layer into CS3. Smart layers retain a connection to the tool that created them so that you can go back and change it later. I duplicated the smart object via copy which put a new layer in. I double clicked the layer image which in turn put me right back into Adobe Camera Raw where I left off. I adjusted the exposure back up so that I see more detail in the highlights and less in black. When I returned to CS3 from the plug-in the image took on new detail from the "negative stack" while affecting the exposure by making it a little brighter. I went back/forth and decided to do this in three steps since the transition between dark/light was so extreme. Do I duplicated the top smart layer again to get a third layer that I could double click and go back to ACR to get the final negative to lay on top. I did no further processing to this image. Actually I did no processing to this image in CS3 since I just stacked three negatives on top of each other. HDR you say. No, not when it was all in your camera at the fraction you snapped your trigger. Just you getting to decide how the 4096 shades of Red, Green, and Blue should be used ... not Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, etc. John
ctfchallenge23-Dec-2007 17:07
Of course, as limited as our display devices are today (prints much much worse) how would we use 4096 shades for each color, see these, or process these. Basically the new CS3 has done this remarkable job for you. It has a plug-in which is a negative developer. I developed three negatives from the number values in raw and stacked these three negatives on top of each other (as layers) to put all the details in while deciding that the shade pull had to be a visible subject. Of course all of these have to fit within our current visible representative media of 256 value of a jpeg. During his lifetime, Ansel constantly fought the battle of what his camera could capture versus what his media could represent. He pushed it as no other could. If Ansel could have had the ability to make differently exposed negatives from a single camera capture he would have used it and stacked the negatives together to get detail in the highlights and shadows. Because he wanted you to feel like you were there. John
ctfchallenge23-Dec-2007 16:50
I decided to capture this in raw + jpg to illustrate a point that has been argued for a while in our discussions. Would Ansel use raw if he were alive today?

Ansel was all about capturing the immense dynamic range of his shots. For my scenery shots, I am too. A raw file is not an image. It is a structured file of values captured from every CCD element in the camera array, along with, a recommendation of exposure, white balance, and color temperature it would use if it was going to make a jpg. So it has made no decisions for you. It hasn't decided what you thought the subject might be and determined sharpness, and the three cross-coupled values of exposure, temperature, and white balance. These latter three each affect each other in turn. Once these decisions are made they are hard to undo. But to me the most important thing that affects the others is exposure. It has to decide where to center the 256 shades of red, green, and blue even if one or two get clipped (affecting tint/white balance). That is unfortunate because today's cameras (even the cheap ones) collect 12 bits for every color. 4096 shades of red, green, and blue for each pixel in the array ... a big file of numbers.
ctfchallenge23-Dec-2007 16:35
First of all, I put a subject (the shade pull) at the 1/3 point to keep a little interest on it. Why? Because in real life this wasn't visible to the human eye. I walked into my bedroom this morning to have the sun shining on the window and making for a warm mood. When I looked at the shade my pupils contracted and I could see the shadow of the bush outside and the droplets on the window, along with, the beautiful texture of the shade. It was almost white and I could barely see the folds. Then I looked at the curtain (almost black out type) that was glowing from behind and the beautiful texture in it. The shade pull could not be seen because my eye wasn't able to isolate it because of the bright/dark transistion at this point. John