How to Expose Your Photo in High Contrast Scenes

Ever take a photo of something very bright and very dark and kick yourself when you see that the final image is lacking some detail? That’s called a high contrast scene. Today’s gorgeous little model has some adorable white barrettes paired with big brown eyes.

Although your eye can see most of the detail in a high contrast scene, cameras don’t have the same dynamic range. Film cameras had a bit more than digital cameras. DSLR’s have more dynamic range than point and shoots. So, when taking a photo in a high contrast scene, you need to make some exposure decisions. Some of these can be corrected in Photoshop, some cannot.

As you can see in the photo above, we can see all the detail in both her barrettes and eyes, but the photo looks a bit dull. Here’s what the levels diagram looks like to start:

As you can see, it’s a bit unbalanced. Let’s drag that white slider over to where the histogram just begins to rise. That will brighten things up a bit. Here’s our new histogram:

And here’s our new version of the photo:

While it certainly is brighter, we lost the detail in the barrettes. Here’s another example with an even bigger smile:

Notice that in this exposure, the detail in the barrette is already missing. And yet, the photo still looks a bit dull. Doing another levels adjustment we wind up with:

Again, it’s a subtle difference, but the colors are all a touch brighter. With barrettes and eyeballs, the decision of how to expose isn’t that critical. Always go for the eyes. Here’s where it gets harder: if she’s sitting next to someone of a much lighter skin tone.

That’s when some knowledge of the tradeoffs is necessary. If you’re using an automatic setting on your point and shoot, you want to aim your camera at something in between your most important dark object and your most important light object. Then, you will lock in the exposure and recompose your scene. Depending on your camera, this can usually be done by partially holding down the shutter button.

You can usually recapture some of the detail in the underexposed (or darkened portion of a picture) when you correct it in Photoshop. You cannot recapture detail in the overexposed (or blindingly bright portion of a picture). You can read more on that in my post on biggest mistakes you can’t fix in Photoshop. So, a good rule of thumb is to aim your camera at something closer to your most important light subject (but still in between the lightest and darkest subjects).