Blowing Your Highlights? Easy to Follow Guide on How to Stop Blowing Your Whites!!

g'day and welcome to the channel in today's video i'm going to help you to stop blowing your whites i'm going to show you how to stop blowing them in the field and also how to fix them and recover them in lightroom hopefully you'll find this video interesting and beneficial for you and your photography all right it's probably easiest i've heard just show you an image with blowing highlights as you can see on the screen there's a sulfur crysta cockatoo a beautiful australian bird and these white feathers are fully blown on the left hand side that is there's no detail whatsoever and that makes for a pretty unpleasing image so any bird that has sort of white feathers or maybe light grey are prone to blowing highlights we as photographers want to ensure we don't take photos like this penguin where all the whites are very bright instead we want to ensure we're getting images that include detail in the bright areas such as this and as wildlife photographers it's important that we do everything we can to capture well-exposed images this will ensure the highest quality files with the most details all right so what causes blind highlights well basically it's just when too much light reaches the sensor so when too much light comes into the camera the images overall it's just too bright and that results in the very bright blowing highlights all right so let's look at a correctly exposed white bird this egret image overall the scene is not too bright it's not too dark if we zoom in we can see details in the feathers and this is what we want now if i'd overexposed this photo by letting in too much light the image would be overly bright as we can see on the screen and if we zoom into the bird all the white areas are now pure white and lack any sort of detail the whites are blowing and this is not what we want we can see how the exposure directly impacts how bright or how dark an image is and on the screen you can see on the left that's an underexposed image that is not enough light to set the sensor and the overall image is too dark the middle is the correct exposure so just the right amount of light and on the right is overexposed or too bright and it's when it's overexposed that leads to the blown highlights so the obvious question is how do we know we've got a correct exposure in the field well the answer is your histogram and your blinkies if you don't know much about histograms or you've struggled to understand them i did a complete video on histograms that you're free to check out all right the first thing is your blinkies each camera will have a slightly different terminology for this it's basically a highlight warning and you can enable it in most menus and what this does is that after you take a photo if you look at the photo on the back of the camera and you review it any part of the image that is blown or has blind highlights will flash or blink hence the term blinkies so by turning that on you can take a photo check the back of your screen if it's blinking you know you've over exposed that image and you need to reduce the exposure so the blinkies are an exceptionally good tool to let you know whether you have blown your whites and i would implore you to definitely enable that and use that when you're out in the field it's important to know though if you blow your whites like i did with the soft crystal cockatoo there's nothing i can do to recover them they're gone for good you can do something in photoshop but ideally you want to get it right in the field and that's why it's so important to make sure you do get it right and having your blinkies on will help you stop blowing your whites the next most important thing is your histogram and all cameras will have that built into it and you really do need to understand how to read a histogram it will help your photography no end and i highly encourage you to learn as much as you can about them and i'll try and explain it very succinctly here for you let's have a look at this gray teal that featured in a recent video i took this is what i would say is a correct exposure it's not too bright it's not too dark it's kind of just right all right so your histogram works in shades of grey so let's convert this duck shot to grey scale now i'll overlay a histogram graph over the top of this image we can see that there's very dark dark medium light and very light what the camera is going to do is it's going to look at all the pixels in that image and it's going to plot them is it dark or medium or is it a bright image and so we'll go through the entire image and plot it on this histogram and then if we look at the histogram after the camera's done that we can see that we had mostly light pixels and some medium ones a few very light and a few dark bottom half of the water would be all those light pixels and the medium ones would sort of be those darker areas and that's all the histograms doing it's just plotting how bright or dark your image is from a grayscale onto this graph and you can visually see it yep that image is pretty well exposed nothing's too bright nothing's too dark the shape of it is completely irrelevant because the shape will just change based off how many bright and dark pixels you have in your image so the other thing you need to know with histogram is there's probably i believe there's 255 shades of grey that the histogram's plotting it starts from pure black on the left and it goes to pure white on the right so a blown pixel so a pure white one will show up at the very right edge of a histogram so if we have a look at that silver crested cockatoo again let's convert it to grayscale and we can see that there's quite a bit of white quite a bit of dark so think about what the histogram is going to look like it's going to have lots of dark pixels and lots of bright ones or white ones and when i overlay the histogram that's exactly what we see so the blown white pixels butt up against the right hand edge of the histogram this is showing us that it's overexposed and this is a great tool when you're in the field if you take a shot and you look at the histogram and there's pixels up against the right hand side we know we've blown our whites and that's a guide to us and to tell us that we need to reduce our exposure we need to get those pixels off that right hand side so let's compare that image to another software crystal cockatoo image i took convert it to grayscale we whack on the histogram and we can see we've got some light pixels and some medium pixels but none of them are butting up against the right edge because i didn't blow the whites and that's ultimately what we want we want to get our pixels as far to the right without hitting that edge that will mean we've got a high quality file that's exposed correctly all right so how do we access the histogram on a dslr once you've taken the photo you there's often options just to see it on the back of the screen and this is how i do it on my canons when i review an image the histogram will come up and i can read it there and so if the image is blinking and my histograms to the right i know i've blown the images luckily on a mirrorless body you can actually have the histogram and the viewfinder so as you're looking and taking the photo just your settings on the fly which is amazing it's a major benefit of mirrorless is to have that histogram in the viewfinder so you can be sure your exposure is bang on every single photo that you take and just in regards to settings i don't have time to explain aperture iso and shutter speed but i did do a video explaining all those three settings so if you want to know everything about your settings on your camera be sure to check that video out okay so now we know how to read a histogram we've got our blinkies on how does the camera actually set the exposure and how does it get it wrong well when you take photos you're either in full manual mode where you select all three settings or you let the camera pick one and that's an auto exposure mode so the common ones are auto iso and aperture priority what that means is that in auto iso you set the shutter speed and you set the aperture and the camera will change the iso depending on what it thinks is the correct exposure and i think that's probably the most common method people take photos and i'll explain that to you now so when you use auto exposure the camera has a meter that is taking a reading from the scene it's actually the reflected light of whatever you're looking at comes into the camera and it takes a reading and it'll either increase or decrease the exposure how it does that is it turns it to grayscale and it's trying to get 18 gray so sort of a mid-tone most images when converted to grayscale will be in this mid-tone and that's what it's going for it's just going for an average and most of the time works pretty well but if you have a white bird with a dark background the camera is going to go this is too dark i need to increase the exposure but when you increase the exposure the bird becomes blown and it's just way too bright so there is a few metering modes on your cameras the majority of people use evaluative metering what that means is that the camera is taking the average from the entire scene all right so if the camera is getting the wrong exposure we need some way to tell the camera to get the correct one and to do that we use exposure compensation i think it's probably easiest if i go out into the field and just demonstrate that to you all right so the best way is just to show you by example how i photograph a white bird using both auto exposure and manual mode so that i don't blow those whites so as you can see behind me here we've got a sulphur crystal cockatoo soft toy nice and white and i'm going to be photographing that and just seeing what sort of issues i run into with the exposure and how i fix that so i'm going to be shooting with my 5d mark iv 70 to 200 millimeter lens i'm currently in auto iso which is an auto exposure mode the camera is going to choose the exposure i've dialed in 7.1 aperture and 3200 of a second which is quite high but we've got direct sunlight blasting onto this bird here and so we're going to let the camera have a go and just see what happens now before i do that i've mentioned those blinkies i need to make sure that the blinkies are on so in the menu we've got highlight alert enable and that means if any part of this bird is overexposed it's going to blink at me and tell me so first off we just auto exposure mode i'm just going to look down the viewfinder take a shot of the bird have a look at the back of the camera and i can immediately see that the blinkies are flashing telling me that part of that bird is overexposed the right hand side and if we look at the histogram we can see that there's some pixels or white pixels touching the right hand side indicating that they're pure white and we've blown the highlights so that's not what we want so at the moment if i was just to continue photographing this bird it would continually be overexposed so we need to turn down the exposure so we're letting in too much light so we need to turn down that exposure to make that bird darker so to do that we use exposure compensation we tell the camera how much to underexpose or change the exposure by for every shot so i reckon we'll start with a third of a stop underexposed so on my canon camera i actually hold down the set button and then turn this top dial to the left once and that is now one third negative exposure compensation i'll take the shot and i'll check the back of the screen and we've still got a bit um flashing we've still got the blinkies going so we'll go another third all right so now i've put in minus two thirds exposure compensation and we'll take a shot check the back of the camera and that's good so we're no longer flashing the hot the histogram's no longer touching the right hand side i'm happy now i can take shots and not be worried about blowing the whites and it's really that simple i've just checked the back of the camera made sure the whites aren't blowing or flashing and i'm right to photograph this bird without worrying about it blowing the highlights so for every shot from now on we've dialed in minus two thirds exposure compensation so whatever the camera thinks is the correct exposure we're saying no we want that to go back by two thirds to make it darker because the camera keeps wanting to make it too bright and that's how that's all you need to do with auto exposure is just constantly be checking the back of the camera and pretty much any white bird on a dark background you're probably going to have to dial in negative exposure compensation all right so as you saw in that little demonstration what i needed to do was when the bird was too bright i just dialed in that exposed negative exposure compensation until the exposure was right and it was happy days and look when i shot in auto exposure if the bird was white i just dialed in negative third to had a look and then i just dialed in negative two-thirds if it needed more or less but i always knew if i was photographing a white bird chances are that i had to put in negative exposure compensation it's just something you need to remember if you're photographing white birds and so here's another image that i took of a pie to oyster catcher i was laying down in the mud i knew that the bird's white's probably going to be blowing so i ended up dialing negative a third exposure conversation a little bit darker ended up with a nice exposure even though i know about blinkies and histograms occasionally i still get it wrong and how do i get it wrong well that sulfur crested cockatoo image what actually happened was i was photographing a kingfisher it was amazing session and you can see on the screen here it is with a lizard in its mouth and i had the correct exposure dialed in for this shot and then out of the court of my eye i noticed a cockatoo land pretty much right next to me and when cockatoos land they put their crest up and they only put it up for a very short amount of time so i've turned my camera and i've just simply photographed this cockatoo with his crest up and hadn't really thought too much about the exposure the bird then went about its ways and i looked on the back of the camera thinking i'd just got some amazing shots and then to my horror they were just badly overexposed and the reason being is this just the white bird and i hadn't adjusted for that white bird so it's another thing to remember that you might have the correct exposure on the bird that you're photographing that doesn't have white if a white bird turns up you need to check the exposure and you often will need to change it so you know unfortunately that's just the way it is i didn't have time to change the exposure and i missed out on a shot it happens and you just need to be aware of it oh i've got ants all over my feet all right so i've covered now how to stop blowing your whites and camera i also noticed that some people blow their whites and post processing so what i mean by that is you might load an image into lightroom a raw image we're always shooting in raw and it might be a little bit too dark so often people will just grab the exposure slider and they'll increase the exposure slider to the image looks about right what they don't know is when you increase the exposure you're also increasing the likelihood that those whites are going to get brighter and then end up blowing so if you do a global exposure adjustment and make it bright it's likely your whites are going to be blowing so you don't want to do that so in lightroom you've also got the white slider and the highlight slider and if you just drag those to the left often that will do enough but sometimes we want a little bit more control we want finer control over our whites within an image but i want to tell you about the adjustment brush in lightroom this gives you fine control over recovering the whites or adjusting the whites within an image so what i would suggest that you do is you just click on the adjustment brush i usually use a custom setting first settings i'd do is just exposure minus 20 highlights minus 20 and the whites by minus 20. those are the settings that we're going to apply to the brush then click on the area that you want to recover so somewhere on the bird that's white click on there and now we need to tell lightroom that we only want to work on the white parts of the image because if we don't do this if i just drag that adjustment brush around it's going to apply the darkening effect to everything on the image we don't want to apply it to the background we just want to apply it to the bird and we need to click on the masking and we want to do color masking and then we have another option here and there's a little color picker tool and we want to click on the white area and this is telling lightroom that we only want to make the adjustments to these white areas and you can see the settings there that i also dial in for the density and softness of the brush etc and now i simply just drag the adjustment brush over the areas that i want to recover and as you can see on the screen we can see which areas are now becoming darker and we've got a lot more control i can push o on the keyboard and it'll show me which areas i've adjusted and i can push o again and it turns it off and this is a very simple way just to recover your whites you just use the adjustment brush over your whites and it will recover those areas once you've finished with the adjustment brush you can then just adjust those sliders sort of left or right until it looks about just right and so i would definitely encourage you to have a play around with the adjustment brush and using that to recover your whites as opposed to just doing global changes all right i'm getting eaten alive by ant so i might wrap this video up in conclusion just turn on your blinkies look at your histogram and by using those two tools you'll do a much better job at not blowing your whites and just be aware of it if you've got a white bird you're likely going to blow them so you need to be looking at the back your screen or in the viewfinder on a mirrorless and just take control of your exposure and ensure that you get it right in the camera if you don't get it right in camera shooting in raw will help you recover them in post also be sure to leave comments below i definitely read all your comments and i answer all of them it's a great place to ask questions if i didn't cover everything or you want to know something leave it in the comments below i'll definitely answer it but until the next video thank you very much for watching take care bye for now and we'll see you in the next one see you later which is your exposure highlight warning is it highlight warning running all the blinkies letting us know so magpie serenading us over here to the left alive by ants she was creepiest

Channel: Duade Paton

Views: 19,581

Keywords: bird photography tips, bird photography, nature photography, bird photography tutorial, exposure, Manual Mode, Auto ISO, Blinkies, automatic exposure, manual exposure mode, Canon cameras for wildlife, Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO, Camera settings for wildlife, best settings for bird photography, motion blur, camera shake, Aperture shutter speed and iso explained, Canon 5dmkIV, Wildlife Photography fundamentals, Stop blowing your whites, blown highlights, Canon 70-200 lens

Id: DTPzMlQY-uk

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020