Post your macro photos here

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Bukitimah

Senior Member
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J-see

Senior Member
This is actually a good example why you need to overexpose these shots instead of underexposing. Underexposing intuitively feels the better option but simply doesn't work when you need to recover the bright tones.

Here's underexposed by two stops. Even after some work I end up with nothing but noisy crap.

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wornish

Senior Member
J-see said:
After toying some more with the candle, I decided to get the macro out.

View attachment 124342
Click to expand...

So you overexposed this by 5 stops and then pulled back the highlights in post ? I am amazed the flame was not even more blown. I guess the missing flame detail is the price to pay to get the rest of the shot noise free.

The ideal way would be to bracket two or three shots and combine using luminosity masks in post but that needs a lot more work.
 
J

J-see

Senior Member
wornish said:
So you overexposed this by 5 stops and then pulled back the highlights in post ? I am amazed the flame was not even more blown. I guess the missing flame detail is the price to pay to get the rest of the shot noise free.

The ideal way would be to bracket two or three shots and combine using luminosity masks in post but that needs a lot more work.
Click to expand...

I used expose for highlights on this one and then overexposed that 5 stops. There's actually hardly any flame detail clipped in this one since the whole histogram is squeezed to the left. By normalizing the exposure again and applying gradient maps, I push parts to the extreme bright to get the nuances out.

This is the shot SOOC:

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I noticed this option when doing night shots last week. When using matrix metering I could overexpose two stops and retrieve all that info without much problems. Only when I went one stop further, it clipped and after normalizing, those tones were gone and replaced with empty white.

There's little reason to bracket these shots if you overexpose the bright tones. If not clipped, LR can pull the whole range out easily. It just is some work. About every shot I took during the last days I used this technique in some way or another. That's why I can shoot below a bridge and show details in the dark and light parts using a single shot.

Instead of luminosity masks, in LR I apply gradient filters to adjust local exposures. Many of my shots have 5 or more filters overlapping parts of the shot. It also allows me to adjust temperatures.

This is what I tried to explain a while back. Here's a vid of some funky French guy I discovered some days ago who switched from HDR to LR after it enabled hem to use this technique.

Lightroom Tutorial: Recover a White Sky in Lightroom - PLP # 13 by Serge Ramelli - YouTube
 
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aroy

Senior Member
I think that the candle shot is one of those few situations that would benefit from HDR - tonal gradation of flame and noise free surroundings.
 
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