Fine Art Photography Blog

Digital cameras are a lot like slide film, from the 35 mm days. With negatives you would expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights; slide film had a much narrower exposure latitude that would clip the highlights easily … much like today’s CCD or CMOS chip.

So, we find ourselves exposing for the highlights, checking the histogram when time allows, and avoiding overexposure like the plague. This doesn’t mean you should under-expose by habit, but when there are important highlights in a scene, you may be forced to underexpose much of your photo to retain detail in the brights.

Over-exposure can be the kiss of death, so when you “develop” an image in Photoshop, you don’t want to create the same problem in post. There are a number of ways to approach this, all involving selective edits. The Curves and Levels tools are a good start, but you can do better.

1. Set the foreground color to white.
2. Choose Color Range under the Select menu. (Photoshop)
3. Make sure the Selection radio button is checked, and not Image. Now adjust the Fuzziness slider until you see a map showing the areas you want to preserve detail in. Click OK.
4. Invert the selection. Under the Selection menu, click Inverse.
5. Feather the selection. A web sized image might need less than a pixel, while a print sized image may need close to ten pixels. This can depend on how the brightness levels are spread across the frame as much as on resolution.
6. Now that you have everything but the highlights selected, use the Curves or Levels tool to bring the rest of the image up.

You can save a step and select the shadows and midtones directly, but this tends to be more accurate. Notice the results, from Mount Ranier, Washington.

The change is subtle; most easily seen in the mountain to the left. The mountains to the right are also brighter, but at the price of less contrast. Any changes applied this way should be done in an adjustment layer if possible.