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I've shooting lately in very rough lighting conditions. From shooting kiteboarders in black wetsuits, towards the west, over water, around 1-3pm in hazy conditions to shooting them against the setting sun, it's been one exposure challenge after another. As I've been working with the images, trying to get the best results possible, I've found a nice exposure adjustment trick that I wanted to share.

The situation I'm often facing is that I need to open up a stop or so to get detail in the person's face, and I'm ok with parts of the water going white. But when processing the images, I want to preserve the dark part of their wetsuit along with the detail in their face. Just making an exposure adjustment (compensating down) wouldn't work, because that would make the white areas gray, and I don't want that.

Here's a sample image where I was trying to retain some color in the sky while also keeping detail in the rider. This isn't quite as extreme as some of the images I've been working with (see my images in the latest issue of The Kiteboarder for an example of extreme lighting), but it's a good shot to see the difference between these two adjustment techniques.

After exposure, the next adjustment thought that comes to mind is to use levels to tweak the image--bring the black point in and then adjust the quarter tones to restore the detail in the face. Unfortunately, even when I tweak individual channels, I tend not to get results that look good with levels; I sometimes see weird color artifacts for example. In this second image, I've exaggerated the effect, but you can see what I mean.

Instead, what I've found to work really well is a mix of black point and shadows. I start by adjusting the black point until all of the areas that I want to be black are black. Then, I pull the shadows slider to take the areas that aren't black and restore detail in them. This last image shows what that adjustment looks like.

It's really amazing to see how much detail is available for us to work with in modern RAW files!