One series of shots at my first wedding of the season, taken in the shade on a super-sunny day, I've got the faces and groom's outfit (kilt) properly exposed, but I've lost all the detail in the dress.

I was shooting ISO 100, F6.3, 1/100.

How could I have balanced the exposure of the dress with the exposure of the faces?

thanks

Gonna need some sample photos to look at here. If you post some examples you'll get a ton more feedback.

not the best composition, but I just grabbed one.

This is straight from the camera

Well obviously you'll want to adjust the white balance... the dress is waayyy blue, as are the skin tones, so start there. That will obviously slightly change your exposure in RAW. Hopefully you're using LR or Adobe Bridge... both of which will allow you to pull the "highlights" slider to the right (probably half way or less should do it) to retrieve some of the detail in the dress. Don't over-do it or you'll see it flatten out tones in the rest of the image!

Actually, I'm not so sure adjusting the white balance will do much. I don't think this is a problem that can really be "fixed" digitally. This should have been taken care of during capture.

The problem is that the light source was far, far too blue to get a decent exposure of this scene. Load this image up in photoshop, and then load up the 'Histogram' palette. Click the little palette-specific menu in the upper-right hand corner and select "all channels view." Notice how the blue channel is pushed all the way to the right? That's what's blown out.

And why is this? Because that shaded light falling on the B&G was far, far too blue to create a balanced exposure.

Color temperature of light DOES effect exposure, in ways that you can't correct by shooting RAW and "fixing" it later, because the information in the missing color channels simply isn't there. As an extreme example, consider what would happen if you lit an image ENTIRELY by using a red-filtered light. That is, you put a filter in front of your flash that ONLY passed red light, eliminating all blue and green sources entirely. Would it be possible to produce a harmoniously color-balanced image from that, regardless of what you did in post? Of course not, regardless of how you click-balanced, because you can't get blue-channel information reflected back from the subject when no blue-wavelength light ever struck the subject!

That's kind of what happened here. It's actually a fun experiment, and I'd take pictures to demonstrate it if it weren't 3AM and I weren't tired. But yes, your "correct exposure" according to your combined histogram and in-camera meter can be off by a stop or more if your source light is colored particularly poorly.

Point is, no amount of camera gymnastics can fix this image because it was created with poor light. Adjusting the camera (canvas) doesn't fix the bad light (brush strokes). Another sign this image needed some kind of external lighting...notice how the groom's eyes are black pits. There's no light in there, and it just looks kind of creepy.

In the future, find or create better light.

did you meter for the dress?

matt, i believe the question was how she might be able to fix the image, not how to take it... since uh... it's already been taken.

rebecca, if you don't mind sending me the RAW file I'd be happy to look at it for you... I'm not quite sure matt's statements here are entirely correct or helpful to your situation.

but we can agree to disagree.

Are you shooting RAW or jpeg? If it's a RAW file can you use the recovery option when you're tweaking the exposure, white balance, etc? Maybe there is some detail there and you just need to find a way to bring it back in the developing stage.

why was this taken at f 6.3 @ 1/100?

and also it's always harder to recover highlights then it is to lighten shadows digitally...

Matt's right here it is SO blue. Looks like you WB was set to tungsten or a very low K

Without doing any masking (which it needs), here is what I did.
pre> create dup layer
1> shadow highlights 10% on each
2> color balance
uncheck preserve lumin...
select highlights
take blue to -100
take red up a bit
3>adjust just highlights this time 10%
4>create another dup layer
5>color balance reduce blue in highlights again - take down
==did not do this in example==still needs
6>color balance highlights again, drop blue more
7>create mask an blend in dress area (some was already pretty good, some needed more blue removed)

I don't think that the dress is actually "blown" that badly. I do think the colour is off and just warming it up may help a little.

I also believe that she was asking how she could have exposed this image properly to begin with.

If you meter the dress, it will try to make the dress 18% grey, underexposing the rest of the scene.
If you meter the black jacket, it will try to make the jacket 18% grey, overexposing the rest of the scene.
So my guess is that the meter read more of the jacket than the dress, which is why the dress is slightly bright.

If you want to shoot this better, you could meter with a grey card or use an external light meter rather than a reflective light meter (built into the camera)
Alternately you could expose for the dress and fill the rest with flash.

Thanks all. Really appreciate your feedback.

I'm not too worried about fixing it after the fact - I'm pretty sure I can do that. Thanks Mark for your suggestions - gives me a good place to start.

I did shoot in Raw, so I'll be able to recover it. But, what I'm really asking for is - how could I have shot it better in the first place.

I'm not so confident with my flash (although I did get some great group shots at this wedding by turning everyone's backs to the sun and using my flash - I was really excited about those - I was practising what I though I should do - and it worked! Yeah).

For this shot though, I thought that if I'd metered for the dress and used flash, that the dress would get blown out for the flash, so I metered for the bride's face (in camera). Would it have worked better if I'd metered for the dress and then used flash?

If I should just learn to use a grey card - I'll do that!

Matt - I'm really working to understand light, so thanks for your comments. Can you talk (if you have time) a little more about the quality of light in shade? This was a super bright day, with the sun almost overhead (I'm in Canada, and its getting close to summer solstice, so the sun is pretty high), the field was green (but not too bright, still a lot of brown in it) and the barn is a faded red. Other than checking my histogram on camera, how could I have judged the light better ?

Thanks again everyone.

Awesome post Matt, thanks for you help!

Rebecca, I think you've part of the answer already.

Having your camera display the RGB histogram and knowing what you should expect to see vs what you get is probably the easiest and quickest way. It's really the only thing I ever use my LCD for while shooting.

The other thing would of course be making sure your WB setting gets changed if you manually set. I'm suspect you had it manually set to tungsten and it didn't get changed when you went from indoors to outdoors. Getting in the habit of a quick check of the RGB histogram helps as a reminder there too...I know

Should have used a Fuji S5

A real easy way to do this is to utilize the histogram on the back of the camera You rattle off a shot or two and then check the histogram. You see that the dress is clipping/blowing out and then you dial down your exposure. I would suggest shooting in the RAW format if you do not already and shooting MANUAL. The sooner you do those 2 things the better your exposures will become sooner. You have to think FOR YOUR camera in tricky lighting/subject situations...as oppose to it thinking for you in Aperture Priority for example. But use that histogram in your camera

simple quality of light check:

hold out the palm of your hand and do a 360 seeing what the light is doing on your palm. Now you know where to turn your subjects

I'm not sure until I could see the RAW file but it looks okay to me exposure-wise (I'm assuming from what you said about recovery that the highlights are there in RAW). If you would have stopped down more then the shadows on the groom's face would be really, really dark. A solution for all these problems would have been to use some fill flash to lower the contrast in the scene.

That said, here's the recipe I use for these sorts of shots in ACR (lightroom is similar), it should compress the density range but keep good contrast:
Push up exposure just a bit
Push recovery way up until highlights are recovered
Adjust exposure if highlights can't be recovered or require too much recovery (75+)
Put in quite a lot of "Fill Light" and I do mean a lot (depends on shot can be up to 60)
Push up "Blacks" until the contrast of the scene looks good.
You may have to adjust "Contrast" as well if you start loosing shadows because you have to put in so much "blacks."

Sorry, I can't give actual numbers as every image is different.

I don't think that would help in this case because the color of the light is so far off. The problem is that the quantity of blue light in the image is clipping more than the quantity of green and red lights. That skews the entire equation, no matter what you do click-balancing in post. At the extreme example, consider lighting a scene with a completely red light. No other color information....just red. Is it possible to get a "good" image illuminated by a source that included no image in the non-red channels? No, of course not.

Here's a less extreme example. I went out into my foyer and snapped this image. The light source is tungsten and our walls are painted yellow, so the light falling on this white door is very, very yellow.



What does a yellow light mean? A yellow light means there's very little information in the blue channel. Simply put, there are not nearly as many blue photons hitting the sensor as there are green or red photons. As much as we want to abstract the issue away to "color temperatures" and things, it really all comes down to the number and wavelength of photons. So, the histogram for this image looks like this:



Notice how the red channel is clipped on the right there? That's what's flashing on the back of the camera. The red channel, and the red channel only is overexposed on this image. The green channel is...fine, and the blue channel is severely underexposed.

So now let's click balance in RAW, and get this:



Which, as is obvious the historgram:



Is now "underexposed" by about 2/3 a stop.

Adjusted for that, it looks like this:





Regardless, clearly, just looking for clipping doesn't give you a good exposure, because the LCD will blink "overexposed!" even though it's only one channel that's over the top. Once it again, it all comes down to light.

And this is a very simplistic example where we're only looking at a white object. Now imagine looking at a scene with many different colors. Like a white dress, a black tux, and pink skin tones. Now you've got objects in the scene that reflect and absorb all different kinds of colors. So, click-balance (or AWB, or custom WB or whatever) to your heart's content, but if you're shooting the image with an off-color light....you're going to get off-color images.

That said, this usually isn't a problem. Generally, the colors of light we encounter aren't so far off from medium white that a camera white balance adjustment is perceptible. But in this case, it was.

Really, it comes down to a numbers game. If the number of red photons reflected off the subject is so far different from the number of blue or green photons, the image cannot be "properly" rendered. That's the case in this image...the light was so blue, and so far outside the range of the other color channels that a correct color balance cannot be salvaged after the fact.

You know, it's so difficult to say without being able to see the rest of the scene available. I don't think I would have chosen this location to photograph without an additional light source.

I think it just comes down to really looking at (and seeing) light and colors. Practice every day...whenever you're out with friends at a restaurant, look how the light from the overhead lamps falls on their faces. Notice the color casts on their skin. For instance, daylight tends to be bluish, tungsten is a yellow-red, and fluorescent is green.

Then, look at the back of your camera after you take an image. If one channel seems particularly off while the others do not, for an evenly colored scene, that's a good sign you need to change the color temperature of the light in the image.

Best of luck

Matt

I've made this mistake too and it really isn't that big of a deal. Here is what I did. I did some curves adjustments and some selective coloring on the whites. This helped a whole bunch. I just focused on her dress and did this quickly. I also boosted the saturation a bit. Email me if you likey~ This stuff happens to me all the time because I forget to change my setting and halfway in I'm like... oops!

I'm on my laptop so these colors may be way off! wouldn't that be a kicker?

Agg, so much to learn. This is why I love this job.

I do shoot in manual (the other letters on my camera just confuse me), and RAW. I had my aperture at 6.5, because I didn't want to lose the detail of the barn.

So, again, a dumb flash question - if I'd used a flash, and dialed down my exposure a bit, would I have been better able to balance the exposure of the faces and the dress?

I do remember solid gold .

Thanks for the tutorial in histograms and colours Matt, I didn't know all that. I was shooting in auto white balance.

You wouldn't necessarily need to dial down exposure. You could expose normally (making sure with your histogram not to clip the highlights) and the ETTL system should put in enough fill light to brighten up the shadows. I personally prefer to set my flash to -2/3rd for a shot like this, or better yet, to use reflectors.