This tutorial is the first installment of an eye-opening series describing conditions under which you shouldn’t trust a camera’s meter to deliver accurate exposures when shooting images in certain situations. Today you’ll learn how much to underexpose a photo when faced with a low light, high contrast scene.
Instructor Martin Castein is an accomplished London-based pro who specializes in landscape and portrait photography. He not only explains when underexposure is necessary for a properly balanced image, but how to determine the degree to which you must override the meter depending upon the specific task at hand.
The demonstration image is a nighttime environmental portrait of a pretty model captured on the street at night, with a number of lights and other bright elements surround the subject. By the end of this video you’ll understand how to expose scenes like this to achieve the specific look you want to create.
Castein demonstrates how he determined the correct exposure for this low light, high contrast image. But first he explains what he means by “high contrast” in situations like this: “A high-contrast scene is one in which the highlights are really bright and the dark areas are really dark.” In other words, there’s a huge range between the lightest areas in the frame, the darkest portions of the scene, and everything in between.
Here’s how Castein describes the problem: “If I let the camera pick the exposure, the meter is going to go absolutely wild. That’s because at certain angles there’s going to be a lot of bright lights in the background.” Conversely, when shooting from another perspective there can be very dark sections that bias the reading recommended by a meter.
In short, the meter will try to balance the confusing illumination, and Castein explains why he doesn’t trust the camera to get it right, and the methods he employs for determining exposure settings himself. In this particular image the model is strongly backlit, which factors into the equation.
While this type of illumination may seem to complicate matters further, when shooting at night or during the day, you’ll see why the reverse is often true. That’s because “putting the bright spots behind a subject usually means we get more even lighting.”
So watch how Castein gets the light exactly right for his beautifully exposed image. His method not only works really well for portraits, but for a variety of other subjects as well. Then visit his instructional YouTube channel to learn more helpful tips and tricks.
And on a related note, be sure to watch the recent tutorial we posted from another adept pro who explains how to use Exposure Bracketing when photographing landscape scenes in high-contrast situations.
One common concern when photographing outdoor photos under challenging light is that the images we capture don’t appear as impressive on the computer as the scene we witness through the viewfinder. If that sounds familiar today’s five-minute Lightroom tutorial will set you straight in a hurry.
Instructor Neil Borg is a self-taught pro specializing in travel and landscape photography, and he’s an expert behind the computer. He kicks off this episode with a quick description of the problem. “One of the most important post-processing skills is the ability to extract color from photos.” He explains why shooting in Raw provides maximum control and versatility when tackling this essential task.
The goal is to achieve vibrant tones while keeping things looking natural, and Borg demonstrates simple global and selective enhancements for “adding some POP” without going overboard and risk messing up the shot. This involves taking time to carefully evaluate an image to determine a strategic plan before jumping into the enhancements.
Borg’s sample image is a flat and uninspiring seascape shot with dull colors and less than optimum composition, but it does have potential. He’s working in Lightroom, but everything you’ll learn can be easily accomplished with just about any other post-processing software you use. His goal is to “increase the vibrance of colors individually in order to make certain tones stand out more than others.
He begins with a few global adjustments, the first of which is to change the profile from Adobe Color to Adobe Landscape, and that immediately makes his image slightly more vibrant. Then he significantly reduces highlights and increases shadows. You might expect him to also crank up Vibrance, but Borg avoids this step for now because doing so “will increase color everywhere, and that’s not something we’d like to do.”
The real magic of Borg’s approach occurs with the selective enhancements he makes to various portion of the photo, and he uses a number of Color Range masks to accomplish this straightforward task. As you’ll see, “this allows us to select a range of colors in order to be able to affect particular areas that need to be enhanced in indifferent ways.”
Borg walks you through the step-by-step process that makes the image far more compelling, and then demonstrates a few tricks for refining the result. The tutorial concludes with a bit of careful cropping that improves the composition of the shot.
There’s much more to see on Borg’s instructional YouTube channel that has almost two million devoted subscribers. So make a point to take a close look and see what he has to offer.
We also recommend watching the related tutorial we posted with another pro who demonstrates the best way to shoot and edit beautiful spring flower photographs for images that pop off the screen.
