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FEATURED WEB TUTORIAL: EDITING
 

Adding Dynamic Range to Any Digital Camera

Published by:  Ken Rockwell
Tutorial Preview:

The biggest technical limitation to today's digital and video cameras is their horrible highlight overload characteristics.

I get a little technical in the nest section. If you'd rather not bother with the math then skip ahead to the examples and solution further down.

The Problem

Film overloads gracefully. It's natural. We're used to the way highlights look on film. This graceful overload curve is called a shoulder. Even several stops above white film is still getting just a little bit whiter as you add more and more light to it. If you look at a histogram of a properly scanned film image you'll see it go back down to zero as it approaches 255 white. Color objects merely get less saturated as they gradually wash out to white.

Digital, including your point-and-shoot to DSLRs to $250,000 digital cinema cameras, are completely different. The highlights on digital head towards white (255) and simply clip as soon as they get there. Digital has no shoulder and there is no gradual overload. $250,000 digital cinema and video cameras sometimes have shoulder adjustments, but they don't do what film does. Every slightly overexposed digital shot shows a spike on the right (white or 255) side of the histogram. This spike counts all the pixels that pegged at 255.

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