Exposed // Bracketing vs ETTR

this video is brought to you by squarespace when i'm out shooting with other photographers a pretty common occurrence is i will be set up i'll be taking my images i'll be exposing to the right or exposing for my highlights we'll talk a little bit about what that means and the person next to me will be firing off a three or a five shot exposure bracket so i wanted to make a video today talking about when does it make sense to exposure bracket like that and when should you or could you get away with just exposing to the right exposing for highlights and what does any of that even mean so that's what we're going to talk about in today's video let's jump into it so first off i wanted to talk about a perfect use case for bracketing images a scene like this where everything is static nothing is moving it makes total sense to exposure bracket we can easily take one image for the shadows then one image for our sky that way we're maintaining all of our highlight information perfectly we can almost get the entire scene if we look up here to the right at our histogram we can almost get the whole scene in one frame but honestly images like this are so easy to expose your bracket and to expose your blend that you're kind of you're just better off to go ahead and do that because by the time we take an image that is exposed for our highlights and brighten it up to where we can see deep into the shadows we are going to start noticing some noise or getting some noise and there's really no reason for it because it's so easy to exposure blend we have nice sharp lines this is a very easy to exposure blend type image and you'll end up with much higher quality print details if you do it that way so this is a perfect example of an exposure blend and an exposure blendable image is that even a word probably not but this is a good time to exposure bracket let's talk about when that's not a good time to expose your bracket so a scene like this where we have some deep shadows and very bright highlights where the sunlight is hitting some of these limbs this is one of those cases where it would be nice to be able to maybe recover some of those highlights with a darker image in a bracket series but the problem is things are moving there's a little bit of a breeze this day the limbs are moving around which means that nothing is going to line up so the best the best that you can do is just expose for your highlights meaning expose the image as bright as you dare before blowing out the highlights i've actually blown just a few highlights here if i click on my highlight alert and then zoom in you see these red areas are actually a little bit blown out but we can recover them and keep them looking fairly natural when you expose to the right all that means is you are exposing it as much as you can before blowing out highlights this is one of the reasons that i often tell people i never look at my meter i've ne i never look at the what my meter says on my camera because i don't care what the meter says on my camera all i ever really care about is my histogram so one of the things that i always recommend to people is that you have your highlight alert or highlight warning or your zebras turned on on the sony system they're called zebras and i set those to a hundred percent or a hundred plus which means that anything that reaches white will start blinking at me on the canon and nikon system it's called highlight alert or highlight warning i believe what's so great about having those turned on is as you are exposing your image or after you've taken your image it's going to blink at you anything that has been overexposed the goal is always to expose it as much as you can before getting any of your blinkies or zebras whatever you call a lot of cameras will give you a warning before you've taken the image whether you have any blinkies or blown highlights but it's the only accurate uh histogram or blinkies that you ever get is after you've actually taken the image and you're playing back the image so i highly encourage all of you guys to turn on highlight alert or zebras or highlight warning whatever it's called on your particular camera have those on that way when you play back and review your image you'll know if you've blown any highlights the goal is always to expose the image as much as you can without blowing out any of those highlights even if it does not look good on the back of your camera case in point look at this next image straight out of camera this image looks like this and granted it looked even worse on the back of my camera because i'm standing up on a vista i was zoomed in way telephoto at the rolling hills in the distance and to my eye it looked much better than this granted of circular polarizer probably could have helped i think i loaned mine out on this particular day but i was much more tempted to expose the image like this to where at least those shadows in between the hills are reaching almost a shadow if we look at our histogram you can see in this image you know i'm exposing most of the scene in the lower part of the histogram or the left part or the shadow portion of the histogram in this image i've definitely moved most of that information a little further right now ideally i would have exposed the scene even more the reason you want to do that the reason people are always pushing for exposing to the right and ranting about why it's a good thing is because the way our cameras work the right side of the histogram records far more information than the left side of the histogram so if i would have exposed this scene more like this where it's recording the majority of the data over on the right side of the histogram that actually would have been the highest quality rendition of this file i could have got they would have recorded the most amount of information what i mean by that is that it would have recorded the most amount of gradations in color and in tone so if you think about what we would likely do in post-processing to an image like this we're obviously going to add a whole bunch of contrast to it so if i grab the black slider and move it left as well as the shadow slider do the same with the white slider we'll move that right what we're doing in effect is stretching out this histogram something more like this is probably what we would likely do in post-processing to this image now if we did that with an image where i uh severely underexposed it we're going to be stretching out all of that tone and color information and by doing that we're going to end up with areas in between where we just don't have that data because we've stretched it beyond its limit the more data we have for our tones and color gradations the more it's going to hold up to all this contrast we're adding to it so in a very flat scene like this you're always you always should be exposing that to the right it doesn't matter whether it looks good on the back of your camera what matters is if it still looks good after you've added all this contrast to it so expose flat scenes to the right and get that information recorded on the right side of your histogram so in a scene like this one of the things that we're up against here is the fact that all of these tree limbs are blowing in the wind it was a breezy day or breezy morning and all of those tree limbs are moving around and that means that if i attempt to blend in a darker version of our sky into this frame we're going to end up with weird halos all over the place as we try to blend those two together because things just don't line up it's not going to work so in a scene like this we have to expose to the right expose for our highlights if i turn on my highlight alert you can see that i have not blown out any highlights right in this areas where that would have happened and so now we as i darken this down you can see that we have all of our color information we have a nice sky and i've exposed it as much as i could that way we end up with nice clean shadows even after it's been brightened up a couple stops that's why as landscape photographers we're excited about cameras that have lots of dynamic range it means that we can brighten up those shadows and not have tons of noise in those shadows i know if i would have done this with my canon 5d mark iii back in the day those shadows would have looked absolutely terrible i would be forced into a situation where i'd have to either leave those shadows very dark or i would have to try to exposure blend and it probably wouldn't end up very well so this is one of those cases where i choose to just expose for my highlights meaning expose it as bright as i can without blowing any highlights and then dual process this one file so i'll dual process it meaning process it once for the sky and then once for the shadow information blend them back together and the benefit to that is that all of those tree limbs are going to be lined up perfectly there's not going to be any alignment issues because it's all based off the same file and it's all going to look okay because i exposed it to the right or exposed for my highlights but i do want to share with you kind of a cautionary tale so i have two frames here i have this frame and this frame these were taken seconds apart these were both taken with my a7r4 one was taken to iso 100 which is considered the base iso for my camera meaning it's the highest quality iso for my camera and then i took this one with at iso 50. i took one at iso 50 because i was trying to get it to a shutter speed and i was too lazy to throw an nd filter on so i exposed both of these to the right the exact same exposure values here you can see my histogram looks identical between these two frames but when i darken them down we'll darken this one down and we'll darken this one down when i darken them down the highlights look great in my iso 100 shot but in my iso 50 shot you can see that the colors are starting to look just wrong essentially if we zoom in here you can see that you know some of the saturation is weird the colors are just different there's a lot more magenta a lot more red color channel in the iso 100 shot than there is in the iso 50 shot the reason for that is because when you use an iso that is not your base iso iso 100 is my base iso when you use an iso 50 essentially it's taking a photo at iso 100 and then darkening it down one stop darkening it down one stop the the result is that you lose a little dynamic range in your highlights so even though my histogram looked right i was blowing my highlights and losing some of my color fidelity up in those highlights up in that sky so if you are going to expose to the right be very very cautious about doing it at an iso 50 or an iso 64 whatever is beneath the base iso for your particular camera so here is another situation where i would in fact exposure bracket or exposure blend i have this scene where i have the majority of my frame looking pretty good i've exposed it well i have plenty of highlight or plenty of shadow information but i'm shooting directly into the sun and i would like to make the the area around the sun a little bit more defined and kind of shrink the size of that sun i did take a darker frame that way i can bring in some of the highlights around that around our light source so i'll quickly show you how i would bring these two files together the first thing i'm going to do is open them up as smart objects in photoshop that's going to open them up as separate separate files inside of photoshop because you can't stack smart objects automatically unfortunately but it's really easy to bring them together i'll just grab my move tool hold down shift click on the thumbnail and drag it over to the other image and then let go so boom boom oh but unfortunately we have just a wee bit of movement it was super windy this day obviously you can tell so what i'm going to do is just grab my move tool i'm going to decrease the opacity of this top shot and with the move tool selected i'm just going to use the arrow keys to line up the building there i'll be able to tell that it's lined up because it'll go sharp so before after you can see now they're pretty well lined up so i'll increase the opacity of this layer i'm going to put a black layer mask on it by holding down alt or option clicking on layer mask and now all i want to do is just bring in some of the highlights that are happening around this sun the easiest way to do this is going to be with you guessed it a luminosity mask so i'm going to grab a lights 2. i'll see how restrictive that is we'll give this a shot got a lights too i'm going to select it and now we have that lights 2 luminosity mask which is just a selection based on the brightness of our photo we have that selected now it's going to act like a stencil when i paint this in so i'm going to grab a paint brush let's try 30 percent opacity brush and now with the color white i'm just going to do a few clicks right around here i'm going to go down to 10 percent opacity and what we're doing is just trying to make that light source a little bit a little bit smaller so before after you can see we just recovered some of those highlights there and we've done it in a very slow subtle way i could bring in a little bit more of that sky just to recover some of the highlights in the upper portion so i'm going to deselect by going ctrl or command d and then just with a 20 opacity brush just do a couple brushes here that's going to recover those highlights in that sky before after a lot of times an exposure blend doesn't have to be this big long arduous process the trick is just to just to recover a little bit but don't do it so much that it's an unnatural result obviously would go on to do some dodging and burning and get rid of all my sensor dust but you get the idea one more scenario that i want to share with you guys is a night image like this so this was from that same trip in iceland and we had this big dynamic range which is created by the fact that aurora is very bright and the night you know foreground the shadows when you're doing knife photography is very very dark it leaves us with a very difficult to expose image if you look at this i've actually gotten very very close at blowing the highlights in some of my aurora here i'm gonna have to recover the highlights and you can see that they are still there but i was very close to blowing out the highlights which you don't want to do so what i was forced to do is in this image i exposed as much as i could without blowing my highlights iso 4000 f 2.8 for five seconds five seconds was about as long as i could go without blowing the highlights in the aurora or without blurring out the aurora because the aurora is moving five seconds was kind of the sweet spot at this particular moment that night then the second frame i took is this one where we went 200 and what is that 221 seconds so i had a wireless shutter release where i held it down for how many minutes is that four three three and a half oh that's i guess it's about three and a half minutes and then i use the lower iso iso 800 that way we had nice clean shadows so if we look at the shadow information in this plane wreckage you see that the shadows are very very clean especially if we compare to this image by the time we brighten it up if we try to make this one as bright as the other you can see that we have all kinds of noise so i would much rather have i'd much rather have this nice clean foreground than this super noisy foreground but the thing that you have to remember is when you're out taking these images you have to think about the fact that you might need this so knowing what is possible in post-processing dramatically changes how you shoot in the field so i would blend our nice short shutter speed aurora sky with that more clean foreground of the longer exposure and i also took a third image this one here where we i went inside and did a whole bunch of light painting and what's cool about that is it turns the lights on inside of the plane and when you blend them all together it looks like this this video is brought to you by squarespace so probably never heard of squarespace they're kind of this new up and coming uh no they're not new and up and coming i've used squarespace for seven years now and the reason that i continue to use squarespace is because not only does it make my website look the way that i want it to look but it makes updating my portfolio keeping it up to date really really easy it gives me a lot of tools and analytics for the amount of traffic that comes to my website i find it really fascinating actually to look at how international you know my i guess my following or the people that come to my website they're just from all over the place and i find that really cool it also makes it very easy to sell my calendars sell my workshops and do all the e-commerce that i need to do so if you guys are interested in starting your 14-day free trial go to squarespace.com nickpage and then if you decide that squarespace is for you enter nickpage as the offer code or whatever and that'll get you 10 off so thank you squarespace for continuing to support my channel hopefully this video has helped you guys wrap your minds around not only exposing to the right but when bracketing actually makes sense make sure that you're not bracketing in situations where you're not going to be able to blend them together what you need to do in those situations is expose it to the right as much as you can before blowing out those highlights and remember if you have a flat scene push that data over to the right side of the histogram thank you guys so much we'll talk to you later take it easy [Music] everybody [Applause] foreign

Channel: Nick Page

Views: 54,939

Rating: 4.9817829 out of 5

Keywords: photography, landscape photography, nick page, travel

Id: BF6SitdTrqM

Length: 19min 14sec (1154 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2020