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Considerations for ETTR in the Studio or In the Field
You can’t lose by making an additional exposure.
When ETTR really helps
The following situations show even a low level of noise:
- Glossy surfaces as in product photography (e.g., paint on an automobile).
- Out of focus backgrounds of uniform color and/or with smooth gradients of uniform or varying color (portraiture, or a sky/horizon gradient).
- Smooth areas of water or reflections.
- Black and white conversions from a specific color channel.
- Dark blue sky (very underexposed red channel).
Subjects in which there is a great deal of detail help mask noise, but if one wishes to bring up the shadows, noise in dark areas can be very difficult to deal with— ETTR fixes that.
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Diglloyd Making Sharp Images articulates years of best practices and how-to, painstakingly learned over a decade of camera and lens evaluation.
Save yourself those years of trial and error by jump-starting your photographic technical execution when making the image. The best lens or camera is handicapped if the photographer fails to master perfect shot discipline. High-resolution digital cameras are unforgiving of errors, at least if one wants the best possible results.
- Eases into photographic challenges with an introductory section.
- Covers aspects of digital sensor technology that relate to getting the best image quality.
- Technique section discusses every aspect of making a sharp image handheld or on a tripod.
- Depth of field and how to bypass depth of field limitations via focus stacking.
- Optical aberrations: what they are, what they look like, and what to do about them.
- MTF, field curvature, focus shift: insight into the limitations of lab tests and why imaging performance is far more complex than it appears.
- Optical aberrations: what they are, what they look like, and what to do about them.
- How to test a lens for a “bad sample”.
Intrigued? See Focusing Zeiss DSLR Lenses For Peak Performance, PART ONE: The Challenges, or (one topic of many) field curvature.