Highlight clipping.

Highlight clipping is where an area of the photograph is in danger of having no detail retained in it, snow would be a good example of where highlight clipping could occur and also a bright day with detail lost in the sky., you can check for highlight clipping on the back of most camera and it normally shows up by flashing, by checking on this when you take the photographs it gives you the opportunity to alter your exposure if needed.

For this exercise I need to take a total of five photographs one where the highlight clipping just appears, then the next one one f stop lighter then the next three decreasing the exposure by one f stop at a time, the first challenge at the moment will be to find somewhere where I can produce a contrasty image with the weather as it is at the moment this may well have to be indoors possibly a still life but lit so I can 'control' the exposure and therefore the highlight clipping.

Well I have taken the photographs I went for something simple in fact it was the light coming through a tiny window in my house.


This was the metered shot but as you can see there is only a very small amount of highlight clipping to the photograph, burning out areas and showing no detail to the light areas at all.

the second one was taken at one f stop lighter this time the is a much larger area of highlight clipping and a much larger burnt out area with no detail, there is a slight colour cast and less definition to the flowers

the third shot is taken at one f stop darker than the original this time there are no clipped highlights and no areas that have lost detail around the flowers.

The fourth shot was taken at two stops darker than the original  the photograph is really getting dark now but detail is visible in the window that is missing in the first couple of photographs.

the fifth shot was taken at three stops darker than the original far More detail is visible in the window area, but the colour saturation is wrong on the  rest of the photograph.

It is difficult to talk about loss of saturation as the window is clear or frosted rather than a light colour I would like to re do this exercise with my black and white cat as I feel that it will be easier to examine the effects of highlight clipping in the mean time I will process the raw files of the other photographs and see what happens to them.

Below is the photograph with the recovery tool used however I don't think the effect can be seen too clearly on this photograph so #I have also taken the photograph taken a t one f stop lighter and used the recovery tool on this to a better effect.

i have taken the recovery slider about two thirds of the way along the scale and it is possible to see that some of the detail in the glass is now visible for example there is a leaf pattern in the glass which can now be seen.