Exercise 6: Highlight clipping
I took a series of pictures of this house in East Kilbride on an unusually bright day in February.
The image where the highlight clipping was just beginning to show was at the settings of Shutter speed 1/200 and the aperture setting of f8.0 with an ISO setting of 100.
I took my next image, increasing the aperture setting to f11. This image had no highlight clipping and the colour within the photograph seemed more saturated.
When I gradually decreased the aperture by one fstop increments, predictably, the highlight clipping increased, but with the majority of the clipping occurring on the house's white front gable end it was difficult to see the degree of loss of visual information.
At f5.6 the gable end and right had side of the front door experienced clipping with a a visible break in the form of an edge between the white gable end and the white wall in partial shadow. There was a white colour cast along the fringe of conifer pretruding into the gable end. The overall image looks duller than the properly exposed image.
At f4.0 not only is the white gable end is blown out but the highlight clipping has extended to the sky above the white gable end, the large pine tree on the left of the image, the brick work on the front elevation and the trees extending above the house's roof. The brickwork has now become dull, weak and unsaturated but it still holds a great deal od visula information. The pine tree on the left side of the image has a white colour cast along the fringe round the upper half.
At f2.8 there is a lot of highlight clipping present with a great deal of detail bing lost thoughout the image.
Below are the series of images taken:
For the second part of the exercise the three RAW images showing highlight clipping, taken at apertures of f2.8, f4.0 and f5.6 were processed using Photoshop Bridge using the recovery tool.
It was my experience that only the image taken at f5.6 could be manipulated to eradicate the highlight clipping at a relatively low setting of 28.
I was unable to fully eradicte the clipping in the other two images (f2.8 and f4.0), although most was taken away the sofware was unable to tackle the white gable end wall.
