Capture Right : Making the most of RAW

Have you ever seen video tutorials of the advantages of shooting in RAW, being able to pull back immense detail after you take the shot then try the same thing but are not able to pull back some detail? Well, you cannot pull back lost detail because RAW is not a magic format and still obeys the laws of physics.

The aim of this tutorial is to show you how I capture the most useful set of data in one shot while taking a photo; making the most of a RAW file. It focuses on using the HISTOGRAM as a tool and gives an insight on how to read one.

Okay, before we suggest HDR ruling out this "one shot system", HDR is not always ideal for all situations for example, in shooting a scene with long exposure that consists of moving parts as the image for this tutorial. HDR is also not  necessary in scenes with dynamic range less than 5 stops of light. As much as I would like to go into that last statement, it is a tutorial that deserves its own separate post.

Below are after and before images from just one RAW file.

After: Lightroom and Photoshop Processed

Before: Straight out of Camera

After seeing both images, we can see the immense amount of detail being pulled back into the shadows which appear black to the eyes. How is this possible? Let's jump into their histograms.

Histograms

Let us first look at the histogram of the "Before image". I have sectioned and annotated the histogram for easier understanding.

Note: Blacks are really dark shadows and Whites are really bright Highlights.

"Before image"

The idea of capturing the most useful set of data is to avoid clipping in both your Shadows and Hghlights. Clipping occurs when you have pixels with 100 percent Black values or 100 percent white values. Pixels with 100 percent Black or White values are lost data.

You can check for clipping immediately after a shot using the histogram as it's visible as "Blacks" climbing the left edge of the histogram or Whites climbing the extreme right of the histogram. This can be done inn camera if you use a DSLR, Bridge or Compact Camera. DSLR cameras can also help you check for clipping automatically.

Here is an example of a histogram with clipped Shadows and Highlights.

Clipping

The "Before image" Histogram has lots of information in the blacks, whites and highlights but the histogram does not touch or climb the left or right edge, although it is very close in the Darks, it does not clip therefore, the information is not lost. This means that we can shift those Darks towards the shadows to properly expose the image and still bring back detail.

Histogram of the "After image"

Histogram of the "After image"

Finally, we are going to look at the changes made in Lightroom and why.

Changes made in Lightroom

As mentioned earlier, Blacks are really dark Shadows and Whites are really bright Highlights so in order to properly expose the image, I cranked up the shadow slider in Lightroom . Every other slider moved was done with artistic freedom. I pulled up the Whites because the image was taken just after sunset so I wanted that glow around where the sun had set which I consider to be really bright highlights "Whites" and pulled down the highlights a great extent because I did not want them competing with the Whites, this pushes them closer to the Mid-tones were I felt the sky surrounding the glow should be. The blacks where pulled back a little to create contrast and increase the dynamic range of the image.

Note: I did not include the processing done on the colours of the image because it's besides the point. That is why both histograms had just luminance values and no colour information. The colour processing was done in Photoshop.