Is "Straight Out Of Camera" A Productive Goal for Digital Photography?
Here's the best exposure I could get straight out of camera, so you can compare it to the three edited examples I posted yesterday. It's as bright as I could make it before the clouds start to blow out, and I did some noise reduction. That's it. Digital camera sensors tend to have less dynamic range than film, so they're at a disadvantage already. Our eyes change exposure all over a scene, then we rebuild the sense of high contrast in our brains.
Was "straight out of camera" ever really a common goal of most landscape photographers? Film photographers manipulated the light coming in with filters, and they performed a lot of dodging and burning to manipulate the unrealistically simplified version of the scene which the camera produced. It seems that the only other alternative would be to only shoot in well-lit, low contrast situations, and I think you'd end up with the same sorts of results people on vacation get with their unedited snapshots, with lots of blown highlights and blocked shadows.
To be sure, fixing the limitations of a camera, a digital one in particular, can be a daunting task. Trying to come out the other end of the process with a realistic result is like walking a tightrope: it's dead easy to fall off, much more difficult to reach the other side successfully. There's no one "right" or "best" way… often it's productive to try several different approaches and see which one works (if any). To see a few early results on this image, go to my G+ Stream (https://plus.google.com/+JeffreySullivan/posts) and scroll down a few posts to see three different approaches I tried on this image. None are perfect, this may never be what I'd consider a portfolio image, but those boundary cases when you might or might not be able to salvage a usable result strike me as exactly the ones worth exploring in a little more detail to improve your productivity.
You learn a lot more from your failures than you do from your successes, so attack your most intractable editing problems with enthusiasm, and celebrate the failures, because each failed attempt is getting you closer to the few most challenging moments and images which will be successfully and spectacularly saved using the skills and techniques you develop.
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Absolutely beautiful
Interesting contrast to previous posts!
I agree with what you've said here, well stated
Thanks for taking the time.
This is reassuring advice for beginners like me, too. Thank you for the beautiful example pic and the good words.
Personally, I tend to like the photographs that have been touched less and look less photoshopped, but nothing says we should or shouldn't post SOOC. We are artists in every sense, so I see absolutely no reason to stop editing and using filters and start posting photos SOOC, unless you are doing it because you want to.
With my interior work of abandoned buildings, I am often shooting during blue hour and dawn to get soft light inside the buildings, because I am striving to get images exposed correctly in camera as much as possible (I don't like editing and my OCD's definitely help here.) Most of the time my images don't even make it out of Lightroom into Photoshop, because I'm making minor adjustments, but mid-day light often has me wanting to conjure up a composite to get right of the burn outs.
i love it!!! Extremely beautiful...
I tend to decide what I want on a per photo basis; most get some form of editing. With the RAW for this image, you could still do some tonemapping and get a realistic natural looking image...
kinda cold for a swim... but I would!
Film is still the best medium to reproduce images in the dynamic range that the human eye sees. I don't know in how many megapixels do humans see. But digital sensors are becoming much better.