Digital Photography

The digital camera - Blown highlights -canon digital cameras - a view.  An article on understanding what Blown highlights are.

The histogram function on digital cameras is a picture lifesaver. Before digital there was no way of seeing blown highlights or dramatically underexposed areas, but today you can quickly assess the image and its histogram and correct the exposure to get it close to perfect.
One of the important uses of the histogram on the camera is ensuring that there are no blown or burned out highlights in pictures.
Loss of details in the highlights is the biggest problem with digital images. In most cases there will be details left to salvage in the dark areas, but once the light areas go pure white (or pure any color - you can also blow one color channel at the time), there is nothing left to save.

Blown-out highlights is the enemy number one of the digital photographer, and they should be avoided using all means. Unless it’s a goal in itself to overexpose, like in high key pictures, you should try your best to avoid loosing details in the light areas of the picture. Details can often be found in the dark areas, but once they are gone in the highlights, that’s it. They’re gone.

This can be avoided by looking at the histograms.

Canon PowerShot A470 - 7.1 MP

Blown highlights can be seen both in the histogram and in the blinking, black blotches.
This is one a canon PowerShot  A1000IS, and other digital cameras.  It is a extremely nice feature indeed.

A fill-flash, slight underexposure and after work in a photo editing program to get back dark details could have saved it, and the histogram on the back of the camera would clearly tell you that you were in trouble. The histogram can also tell you about lost details in the dark, lack of contrast or too much and a few other things.

Always have the histogram enabled on the digital camera for the same reason. A quick glance tells me whether your are on the right track or not. Some cameras can also flash a mask over bright and dark areas of the picture, giving you even more control, but learning to read the histogram with a quick glance is a good skill to have no matter what.

It seems to me like it’s a flaw in digital imaging — or rather in the combination of the limited dynamic range of the sensors and the way cameras treat the images.

This solution will not work in every instance, but it’s one way to handle blown-out highlights. Let me remind you again that if you are shooting in JPEG mode, the highlights that are overexposed may be lost for good.

Shooting in RAW will give you a fighting chance of bringing back that detail. RAW images contain far more data than JPEGs and recovery of blown highlights will be more successful

Some old photographer once said that any scene that has more contrast than slide film can handle isn’t worth photographing anyway. I think he was exaggerating a bit, but there is an important point hiding in there.

The point is that excessively contrasty pictures are rarely very appealing, and thinking in terms of exposure may not be the best way to approach the problem: the first thing to do would be to think in terms of composition — try framing the picture in a way that the overall contrast is reduced. For example, leave out the sky, shoot either front-lit or back-lit (adding fill-in flash if needed), look for bright surfaces that will reflect soft light into the scene, and so on.

In my opinion, the above holds only for color photography. B/W thrives on contrast — blown-out whites and blocked shadows can actually give a picture a lot of pop, and B/W pictures are often printed intentionally to achieve this.
However, blown highlights do happen in color photography as well, and when properly handled they’re entirely acceptable. IMO the thing to watch out for is blown out *areas* — like the entire sky, large swathes of sunlit area, and so on.

I’m still trying to get it right.

Article by Webmaster www.gotmydigital.com