Re: Revive dark photos -- Conclusion
On Tue, 23 Jan 2007 16:16:49 +0000 (UTC)
"][" <mlist4suntong@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Jan 2007 03:44:39 +0000, ][ wrote:
>
> > Sjoerd Hiemstra's suggestion,
> > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.user/270822
> > is the most comprehensive. I found it has covered all the cases
> > for my dark photos. thanks Sjoerd.
>
> One of my case is in door shooting, with very big and bright window
> background, so the front view is pretty dark.
>
Not exactly gimp related, but might help you with the photography part:
The classical solution in photography is to either overexpose (or expose
according to the room, although you will lose detail outside the window, or
better yet, shoot using a flash (fill flash). This would work as long as the
room isn't too large, especially good if you want to shoot a subject against
the window or the sunset. Can also give impressive results in other situations.
(most, if not all fashion shots are done at least with one flash if not
several, a lot of photographers shoot with flash most of the time not only in
back-lighting situations).
With digital photography you could try lower contrast during shooting and
average your exposure. It would take some work to balance the results
afterwords and depends on the difference in lighting tough. You also need to be
careful with the white balance.
Take note though that digital cameras have a tendency to whitewash (lost all
detail) in bright areas and introduce color noise in dark areas. Film is a bit
better with the noise, but negatives have problems with the dark areas (it is
recommended to overexpose by a third stop) and slides with bright areas
(underexpose by a third stop). Some camera light-meters take this already into
account though.
> I just found that, if you want to get much complicated than above, there
> is a tutorial that shows how to blend two different exposures of the
> same scene to get the best parts of both images.
>
> http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Blending_Exposures/
>
It's a good technique if you don't have subjects and you have a tripod so that
you can take several shots without moving the camera.
I find this technique better suited for scanning slides since the dynamic range
of the film is usually higher than what the scanner can handle.
Reply to: