Hot Spots

[Brian Corbett]

So dealing with them is my weakness. Never been good at it, so I found this image of a C-17 I took a couple years back and decided to tinker.

I knocked the tail and fuselage back a bit via exposure and a bit of Curves, but they still seem hot. Any suggestions? I'm using CS5 with the NIK collection, by the way. Yep... Old school and cheap!

Thanks!

[Jay Beckman]

Unfortunately, there are just situations where the contrast ratio is so great that no film or sensor is able to hold everything in one shot.

Your options are:
1) Bracket and Blend ? Shoot a series of images starting with one that holds the shadows OR the highlights and then works up/down toward the other extreme.  Then in post you layer them up and use masks to blend all the exposures together.

2) High Dynamic Range (HDR) If you?re faced with an exposure situation requiring 15 stops but your camera can only handle 12, then you shoot one frame that holds the shadows up to where in clips and one that holds the highlights down to where the blacks crush.  You can blend them manually in PS or feed them to dedicated HDR software to figure out where the crossover point is located.

3) Identify that you?re in a contrast ratio situation your sensor can?t handle, admit that you don?t want to go through the hassle of building a Frankenframe in post and ?settle? for something ?artsy?

4) Wait until the light isn?t so harsh.  Twice a day the contrast ratio is essentially a straight line as night gives way to day and then as day gives way to night.  This means there are times each day when the whites and blacks (highlights and shadows) aren?t an extreme number of stops apart.

In the earliest days of digital, you often had to expose for the shadows and let the highlights go because any attempt to recover shadow detail meant instant noise and other funky artifacts in the dark areas.  The newest sensors though have turned that thinking on its head.  With the R5, I will expose for the highlights and I can safely push the shadows 3, 4 and even 5 stops in some cases.  It?s a whole new ballgame!

[Brian Corbett]

Tossed it in to Silver Efex Pro 2 and came up with this. It's not so bad, I guess.

[Jay Beckman]

Terrific conversion and a very dramatic image...