Highlights

Highlights

H for highlights – you can’t live with ‘em, but you can’t live without ‘em.

Always one of the biggest technical challenges, and something that most of us get wrong from time to time… For a picture to look REALLY good, you need highlights that are bright, but have detail in them.

The problem is that digital sensors run out of room pretty quickly at the top end of the histogram: they have a response that’s directly proportional to light, while print film gently reduces its response, allowing a bit more leeway.

So you really need to get your highlights under control – be ready to spot when they may go wrong and expose accordingly, and possibly to rescue them a bit in processing.

As my friend, who learned to take pictures when he was in his teens, and the only option was film has found. He’s used compact digital cameras, but they haven’t coped with the tonal range that he finds near his home in Canada, currently snow and trees. A secondhand Fuji XT-1 is now his, with controls that he’s not used to, among them the incredibly useful exposure compensation dial. If they’re too bright, just dial them back with a little negative compensation!

My mate’s making the same mistake I did back in 1976, when I got my Contax RTS: it feels natural to decrease exposure when the subject is bright, and increase it when it’s dark. But it’s exactly the wrong thing to do.

When the highlights are a problem, when they are getting too bright and the review image starts flashing black and white, it’s because they are overexposed, and you won’t have any detail in them.
You’ve got some leeway if you shoot RAW images, but it’s always best to get the exposure dead on to begin with, which is where the compensation dial comes in. If necessary, take a series of shots at different exposures, adding or subtracting adjustment as necessary.

But where the image has large areas of brightness, but the subject itself is relatively dark, the camera meter will aim to make everything mid grey, and underexpose the subject. The classic is grey snow, or a dark yellow beach, with dim and dark figures moving around in front of them. So use positive compensation to make the background bright again.

And – as I’ve so often written in the Critique Gallery, use the histogram view on your camera for reviewing pictures. Just looking at the image on your screen won’t necessarily be enough to make fine judgments.

All of this assumes that the highlights are tending to burn out: but on a dull day, precisely the opposite problem happens, and you come home with a dull, grey image. Sort it out with the Levels adjustment in your software, moving the little triangles in along the bottom of the graph to get a nice result (see red arrows in the image below). Tip – do this before adding any border – it all goes horribly wrong if you’ve got a black or white border round your image at this stage!