Where the Bits Are: Linear vs.

Nonlinear Data
Chapter 2 touched briefly on the fact that your eye and your camera respond to light levels in very different ways. If you double the amount of light being shined at your camera, then your camera will record a 200 percent increase in illumination. Because a cameras response to light is directly proportional to the intensity of the light source, we say that it has a linear response to light. Your eyes dont work this way. Your eyes are much more responsive to subtle variations in bright and dark tones than they are to changes in midtones. In other words, their response to light is not directly proportional to the intensity of the light source in question. Thus, we say that your eyes have a nonlinear response to light. Like your eyes, film has a nonlinear response to light. As you saw in Chapter 2, when you shoot with your camera in JPEG mode, a gamma correction curve is applied to your image to make its luminance response more closely resemble the nonlinear perception of your eyes. Because JPEGs gamma correction yields a light response that is similar to the response of film, any exposure habits that you have from shooting film will most likely still apply. When you shoot in raw mode, though, things work very differently. When you shoot in raw mode, your camera records a lot more data for brighter tones than it does for shadow tones.

Twice the data in half the stops

As youve probably already noticed, many of Camera Raws controls seem to do the same thing. With the Exposure slider, you can brighten or darken an image, but you can also brighten an image with the Brightness control and darken it with the Shadows slider. Understanding how your digital camera captures different tones will make it easier to understand which control to use for a particular adjustment. If your digital camera uses 12 bits of data per pixel, then its capable of representing and processing 4,096 different levels of brightness. In a digital camera, half of those 4,096 levels go toward recording the brightest stop, half of the remaining levels go to recording the next-brightest stop, half of whats left from that go into the next-brightest stop, and so on for the remaining stops that your camera can capture. There is a straight, linear halving of data for each stop. Wh e re the Bits Are: Linear vs. Nonlinear Data 191

2,048 levels

By the time your camera gets down to the darkest stop (usually the shadow areas of an image), it may have only 64 levels left that it can use to represent your darkest shadow details (Figure 6.9). A less pessimistic way of looking at things is to say that if you expose for the highlights, then you ensure that your camera encodes your image with the maximum number of brightness levels. (Well discuss how to perform this type of exposure in Chapter 7.) As youve already seen, where theres less image data, theres a greater chance that posterization and tone breaks will occur when you make edits and adjustments. Because the camera captures so much data for the brighter stops, if you expose to capture as much information as possible from these areas, youll have a tremendous amount of data to work with when you edit. This means that youll be able to make large adjustments without fear of posterization. Conversely, if you underexpose, then youll be capturing more data in the midtones and shadow parts of the cameras rangeareas that arent represented by a large number of levelsand so you will have less editing latitude (Figure 6.10). When you brighten this underexposure, youll almost certainly reveal noise thats been hiding in the shadow parts of your image. To speak of this using terms that you learned in Chapter 3: Youve seen that when you make a Levels or Curves adjustment or use the exposure sliders in Camera Raw, you are compressing or expanding different parts of the data in your image. Since your camera captures so little data in the shadow areas, expanding the shadows is a very bad idea, as it will almost always lead to posterization (since theres not much data there in the first place). Expanding the data-rich highlights into the shadow areas poses far less posterization risk, and because theres so little shadow data there to begin with, theres very little risk that youll be compressing data thats already there. You dont necessarily have to overexpose your images to perform this kind of capture. If your camera has a good light meter, youll be shooting with exposures that yield very good data. However, your cameras metering system is probably optimized to yield exposures that are best for gammacorrected JPEG images. Thus, many meters often err on the side of slight underexposure. While your meter will often be right, its important to keep an eye on what its doing. Well discuss this subject more in Chapter 7.

1,024 levels

512 levels 256 levels 128 levels 64 levels

Figure 6.9 Most of the data your camera captures goes to recording the brightest half of the image. Half of the remaining data then goes to recording the next stop, and so on. This means that your camera records substantially more information for the bright areas of your image than for the dark areas.

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If youre coming from a film background, where youre used to underexposing to protect your shadow detail, youll have to retrain yourself. Underexposing when shooting raw is a bad idea. With digital raw photography, you want to expose to capture as much highlight detail as you can. Youll correct for your shadows later.

Figure 6.10 The image on the left was slightly underexposed. Though the shadows arent clipping and it has an acceptable range of contrast, it has very little data in the highlight areas, the areas where your camera captures the largest number of tones. The image on the right has a lot of highlight information, meaning that its a data-rich image that can withstand a lot of editing and adjustment.

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Measuring in Stops
If you have even cursory photographic experience, youve probably heard the term f-stop. There are two mechanical mechanisms inside your camerathe shutter and the aperturethat control the amount of light that strikes the image sensor. When you change the shutter speed from 1/125 of a second to 1/60 of a second, you double the amount of light that strikes the focal plane, because the shutter is kept open for twice as long. Similarly, when you change the aperture from f/8 to f/4, you double the amount of light that strikes the focal plane because the size of the aperture at f/4 is twice as large as at f/8. (Obviously, moving the other direction, from 1/125 to 1/500 or from f/8 to f/16, results in a halving of the light.) Each of these doublings (or halvings) of light is referred to as a single stop, and youll often hear photographers using the word stop as a measure of light. A simple way to think about f-stops is to remember that a smaller aperture stops more light from hitting the focal plane, as does a faster shutter speed. For example, say youre shooting in a somewhat dark situation and your cameras light meter recommends an exposure of f4 at 1/30 of a second. That shutter speed is a little slow to be shooting hand-heldtheres a good chance that your image will be soft or blurry at 1/30 of a second. Lets assume that flash is inappropriate in this situation. Lets also assume that you have a piece of white cardboard with you, which you use as a reflector to bounce some light onto your subject. Now when you check your meter, your camera recommends f/4 at 1/60 of a secondthats a shutter speed thats twice as fast as what the camera was recommending before. With your reflector, youve just added an entire stops worth of light to your scene and so now have an exposure more suited to shooting handheld. Every doubling of light can also be referred to as one exposure value, or EV. Photographers often use EV to denote over- or underexposure without having to concern themselves with specific aperture and shutter speed values. So if two photos differ in exposure by 1 EV, then one of them was overexposed by 1 stop, through a change in either shutter speed or aperture (or possibly, by a change of half a stop in both parameters). The human eye has a dynamic range of 30 f-stops of lightfrom fully adapted night vision under starlight to brightest daylightabout a factor of 1 billion to 1. The typical digital camera (or film, for that matter) has a range of 8 to 10 f-stops of light (or 8 to 10 EV). Some natural scenes have a range of 12 f-stops (or EV) between the brightest highlights and deepest shadows. The fact that the dynamic range of camera technologies is so much smaller than that of your eye is one of the reasons that photography can be tricky. Your camera often cant record the full dynamic range of the scene, or what your eyes can see, so you have to make choices about which 8 to 10 f-stops you want to capture.

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Reading it in the histogram

From what youve already learned about reading a histogram, you know that when you darken an image, the bars in your histogram shift toward the left. This happens because, after your edit, there are fewer bright values and more midtone and dark values. Similarly, if you brighten an image, the bars in your histogram shift toward the right. If youve exposed an image to try to capture as much data in the highlights as possible, your histogram will have a distribution thats heavy on the right, like the one shown in Figure 6.10. Such an image may appear washed out, or too bright. However, because you have so much image data, you can easily darken some of those captured levels to produce an image that looks better. In the resulting image, the data will appear to have been pushed down into the shadows (Figure 6.11). With all of this in mind, some of the seeming overlap in Camera Raws controls should make more sense, as youll see in the next section.

Going Further with Raw Controls

Chapter 4 introduced you to Camera Raws white balance and exposure control tools. These seven sliders are where the bulk of your raw editing work takes place. In this section, youre going to take another look at these controls, but this time framed within your new understanding of nonlinear data.

Figure 6.11 After the right image in Figure 6.10 has been adjusted, the histogram shows tones that have shifted to the left. Weve darkened some of the bright tones to place them in the middle and shadow areas.

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Adjusting white balance

Youve already seen how to use the Temperature and Tint sliders and the White Point tool to adjust the white balance of your image. Although accurate white balance is great for achieving a faithful reproduction of the colors of a scene, sometimes an image will look better, or more evocative, if it has an extra bit of warmth or has been cooled down a little. Both of these effects are easy to achieve with temperature and tint adjustments. For example, Figure 6.12 shows three images created from the same raw file. The only thing that changed for each image was the Temperature setting in the Camera Raw dialog box. The top image uses the cameras auto white balance selection, which is fairly accurate, given that the photo was shot on a stage with very warm lighting. The middle image is much warmer, and the bottom image is very cool. Depending on the mood you are trying to evoke or the color palette of other images or graphics that you plan to use alongside your image, one white balance may be more appropriate than another. Though you can warm up images using the Curves and Hue/Saturation tools in Photoshop, the Temperature control in Camera Raw is usually a better choice because it properly adjusts all of the tones in your image. Trying to warm an image with most regular editing tools means spending some time adjusting all three areas of an image: highlights, midtones, and shadows. With a white balance adjustment, you get it all at once.

Adjusting exposure
Chapter 4 introduced you to Camera Raws Exposure tool, which is analogous to the white point tool in the Levels dialog box. With it, you define what the brightest point in an image is, and all of the other tones are remapped accordingly. As discussed in the previous section, the brightest stops in a raw image contain the most data. If youve done your shooting job well, then most of your Exposure slider moves will be to darken an image, because you will have tried to capture more from the brighter stops, to collect more data. If you find that you need to use the Exposure slider to brighten an image, its not the end of the world. Your image is not useless, and its not ruined theres just a better chance that your shadow detail will be posterized or noisy after your adjustments.

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Figure 6.12 You can alter the feel of an image by changing its white balance. The top image shows the cameras automatic white balance. The middle image has had a much warmer white balance applied in Camera Raw. The lowest image shows a much cooler white balance. None of these images is right or wrong, but they have very different feels.

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Nevertheless, because its your key to remapping the data-rich bright parts of your image into the midtones and shadows, the Exposure adjustment is the most critical of all of Camera Raws controls. Throughout this book, youve been told of the horrible consequences that result from clipping your highlights and shadows, so you may find it a little odd now to be told that if you try to expose all your shots so that theyre really bright, youll be much happier. Shouldnt you pay attention to what your light meter says? Absolutely. When taking this approach, you will run the risk of clipping your highlight values. Fortunately, Camera Raw has a fairly amazing capability that can help you with this trouble.

Using the highlight recovery function

As you saw earlier, fully clipped highlights are represented on Camera Raws histogram by a white spike at the right edge. However, only one or two channels of a pixel may be clipped; Camera Raw displays each of these as a rightmost spike in the color of the clipped channel (Figure 6.7). First the bad news: A completely clipped highlight is often a bad thing. It will appear in your image as complete white and will contain no detail, and theres nothing you can do about it except hope that you shot an additional, properly exposed frame. A partially clipped highlight, though, is another story. If your highlights are only partially clipped, theres a good chance that Camera Raw can recover them. Consider the image in Figure 6.13. As you can see from the histogram, the blue channel is heavily clipped, the green is barely clipped, and in a few places all three channels are clipped. (The spike on the right side is blue on top, with a tiny bit of green below and then some full white.)

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Figure 6.13 This image has partially clipped highlights, as you can see from the right side of the histogram. In the clipping display, you can see that the clouds suffer from a lot of blue channel clipping as well as some full-blown three-channel clipping.

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By sliding the Exposure slider to the left, you can darken those clipped highlights back into tones that can hold detail (Figure 6.14). In other words, areas that were previously empty white now show image detail.

Figure 6.14 I moved the Exposure slider to the left while keeping an eye on the histogram. When the spike completely disappeared, I let go. As you can see, the result is a 0.75-stop exposure. Though a lot of the image is darker, those areas can be brightened with the Brightness slider. The important thing to notice is how much more detail there is in the foggy areas of the sky.

This type of highlight recovery is not possible with any of Photoshops normal tools, and its another advantage of shooting raw. It also provides you with a little safety when exposing. The fact that Camera Raw can recover some clipped highlights gives you a little more exposure latitude. Highlight recovery is accomplished using several techniques. Some camera manufacturers actually include a little headroom above their set white point. This means that the camera actually captures a little more data that it claims, and if this data is present, Camera Raw can simply grab it and use it to remap the clipped highlight tones. Camera Raw can also use the data in one of the surviving channels to rebuild the missing clipped channel. In the previous example, the histogram indicated that some tones were clipped in one channel, and others were clipped in all three. Fortunately, none of the clipping was so extreme that Camera Raw couldnt rebuild those areas. At other times, you may find that Camera Raw can pull back some of your clipped highlights, but not all, as shown in Figure 6.15.

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Figure 6.15 The upper image has badly clipped highlights. With the Exposure slider, we can recover a lot of detail in the clouds, but no matter how much we move the slider to the left, those completely blown sections of the sky will remain white and unrecoverable.

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When making a big Exposure slider move to recover highlights, be sure to keep an eye on the shadow end of your histogram as well. Youll need to balance the amount of highlight information that you want to recover against how dark youre willing to let the shadows in your image go. Camera Raws highlight recovery function is not just a handy tool for coping with highlight clipping. Its also a safety net that allows you to expose for the right end of the histogram, to try to capture as much data as possible. If you dont know how to control the exposure on your camera, dont worrywell cover that in detail in the next chapter.

Adjusting shadows
You previously learned that the Shadows slider works just like the Black Point slider in Levels (it defines the darkest point in the image and remaps all other tones accordingly), and your understanding of the role of the Shadows tool is hopefully a little more sophisticated now that you know more about the nonlinear nature of raw files. Generally, since the shadow areas of an image contain so little data, its best not to make large movements of the Shadow slider lest you risk introducing posterization and noise into the shadow parts of your picture. Obviously, if you chose an exposure that yielded very low contrast, youll have nothing to lose by darkening the blacks in your image with a Shadows adjustment. On well-exposed images, though, you should use the Shadows slider sparingly.

Adjusting brightness
If youre following this expose for the highlights philosophy, then youve probably started to realize that the brightness of your images will usually not be too much of an issue. The bulk of your correction will be performed with the Exposure slider, which youll probably use to darken the image. However, if youve had to perform any highlight recovery, as discussed earlier, youll probably end up with an image thats a little dark. As you saw in Chapter 4, the Brightness slider lets you adjust the midpoint of an image, just like the Gamma slider in the Levels dialog box; it brightens the midtones without moving the white point (Figure 6.16).

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Figure 6.16 After the Exposure slider was moved to the left to recover the highlights in this image, the picture was too dark overall. We cant brighten the image using the Exposure slider, or well reclip the highlights. Shifting the Brightness slider to the right restores brightness to the midtones.

Figure 6.16 is a good example of the choices you sometimes have to make when editing. A fairly heavy Brightness adjustment is needed to restore brightness to the image. Theres a good chance that this will cause some posterization in the shadows. If the negative Exposure move had been less aggressive, the image wouldnt need such a strong Brightness adjustment, but then we couldnt recover as much highlight detail in the clouds. In this case, we decided that having the well-rendered clouds is worth any damage we might be doing to the shadows in the image. In general, highlight troubles are more noticeable than shadow troubles simply because highlight troubles are easier to see. If a shadow is dark and murky, its not too conspicuous, but a bright area thats lacking detail and is blown out to white is easy to spot. The trouble with this particular scene is that it has a huge dynamic range thats difficult for the camera to capture. Thus, we have little choice but to sacrifice either the shadows or the highlights.

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If you simply have an image thats too dark, then youll need to decide if you want to brighten it with the Exposure slider or the Brightness slider. When brightening an image, you should move the Exposure slider as little as possible, to keep from brightening the shadows too much. Set the Exposure slider to get your whites adjusted properly; then use the Brightness slider to brighten your shadow tones. Though you may not be able to tell a difference in the results, the Brightness slider will probably pose less of a posterization threat to the shadow areas of your image.

Adjusting contrast
The Contrast slider performs two adjustments: it brightens the tones above the midpoint, and it darkens the tones below the midpoint. (If youre used to making corrections using Photoshops Curves controlas shown in Chapter 3this is the same type of adjustment that you get when you apply an S-shaped curve.) In general, the Brightness and Contrast sliders work very well together. Use the Brightness slider to add brightness to your image, and then use the Contrast slider to punch up the image with a little contrast (Figure 6.17).

Figure 6.17 With a very slight Contrast move, we can punch up this image a little bit. We need only a small change since this image is already close to being too dark.

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Reducing Contrast
Youve read a lot in this book about how the human eye is very sensitive to contrast, and how the eye usually prefers contrast in an image, but sometimes an image can be too contrasty. The most obvious example is a person standing in front of a bright window: The extreme contrast difference between the darkness of the persons face and the brightness of the window can make the image difficult to read. Figure 6.18 shows an image with harshly contrasting highlight and shadow areas. Though you can try to lower the contrast of this image using Camera Raws Contrast slider, this really isnt the best approach to solving the problem. First, the Contrast slider cant reduce the contrast by much, and second, it will reduce all of the contrast (Figure 6.19). If you have Photoshop CS or CS2, a better approach is to use the Shadow/Highlight tool (Image > Adjust > Shadow/Highlight). Shadow/ Highlight analyzes your image and performs an intelligent brightening of only the shadow areas. The results are sometimes incredibly effective (Figure 6.20).
Figure 6.19 Camera Raws Contrast slider lets us reduce the contrast, but it doesnt let us go very far. Also, though it lightens the shadows, it reduces the contrast in the bright areas. We need a better solution.

Figure 6.18 This scene had more dynamic range than the camera could capture, resulting in an image thats too contrasty.

Figure 6.20 Photoshops Shadow/Highlight tool makes short work of the contrast problem shown in Figure 6.8. The default settings bring out plenty of shadow detail without compromising the highlights.

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Contrast reduction is useful not only for correcting outright difficult situations. It can also help when an image is properly exposed, but yields just a little too much contrast, as shown in Figure 6.21.

Figure 6.21 Though well-exposed, the contrast in this image makes it just a tad too harsh.

While this image isnt bad, the shadow on the underside of the seagull is just a little too strong. In this case, lowering the contrast in Camera Raw reduces the shadow and produces an image thats a little more evenly exposed (Figure 6.22).

Figure 6.22 In this instance, lowering the Contrast slider in Camera Raw reduces the intensity of the shadow on the underside of the bird, creating a gentler tonal transition.

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Adjusting saturation
While extreme adjustments to the Saturation slider can lead to posterization of bright colors, in general Saturation is a fairly harmless tool as far as your image data is concerned. Camera Raws Saturation slider is not significantly different from the Saturation slider provided by Photoshops Hue/Saturation control, so it doesnt really matter if you make your saturation adjustments in Camera Raw or in Photoshop. However, if you wait to make your saturation changes using a Hue/ Saturation adjustment layer in Photoshop, youll have a little more editing flexibility. In addition to performing your saturation change in a nondestructive manner, youll be able to use layer masks to constrain the effects of your saturation change. Youll learn more about this later in this chapter. There are no real guidelines about saturation changes; its purely a matter of taste. Some images are obvious candidates for saturation adjustments because theyre low contrast and have weak color. Others are good saturation targets because they have strong color that can be made even stronger with a little saturation boost (Figure 6.23).

Tip
You can also think of Camera Raws sliders as controlling the shape of a tone curve. The Exposure slider represents the upper-right point, Shadows the lower-left point, and Brightness the midpoint. The Contrast slider adds two more points to the curve to create a contrast-inducing S-shape.

Figure 6.23 The only change made to the rightmost image was an increase in the Camera Raw Saturation slider.

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Some images benefit from a reduction in saturation. Whether the subject matter requires less garish color or youre trying to evoke a particular mood, reducing the saturation of an image can create a very different feel (Figure 6.24).

Figure 6.24 This image takes on a different feel with less saturation. After reducing the saturation, I brightened the image a bit with the Brightness slider and then warmed it some with the Temperature slider. The bottom image shows the result.

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