Technical Experimentation in Editing and Shooting - Week 12

During this Friday's lesson we learned how to shoot in RAW files meaning that the photographs we take will not be compressed and averaged out (in terms of lighting/exposure/colour etc.) to form a Jpeg. We took some photographs in this format and used the editing programme CameraRAW to edit our photographs to a much better standard than we could have done on photoshop alone. 

I took this photograph during the lesson when we were experimenting with raw files and editing them. As we can see from the histogram in the top left, which portrays a visual representation of the tonal value (colours and tones) in the photograph, there is a large peak in the middle. If the tones are out of range the image is likely to be over or underexposed. In the photo below I have turned the right clipper on (press keyboard button 'O') to highlight overexposed areas in the photo in red. As we can see the lights are very over exposed. I had to turn the exposure, temperature and highlight settings down and the shadows up to achieve the more balanced photo beneath. You can do the same for shadows by turning the left clipper on (press keyboard button 'U') (press both 'U' and 'O' at same time to turn off)

By clicking alt+ dragging the sliders I am able to explicitly see in the photo which areas are overexposed or highlighted (I pushed the exposure up in the case of the photo below to give a better visual representation) The areas in white are the parts which need most attention in terms of editing exposure.

To learn about using histograms in cameraRAW I watched the following tutorial: