Excercise: highlight clipping

For this exercise I needed to find a scene which had a range of brightness and appears contrasty. I needed to find the exposure setting at which the highlight clipping warning just appears.  I made a note o fthe aperture and shutter speed. I increased the exposure for the next shot by one f-stop. This increased the areas of highlight clipping, I took 5 jpeg images and compared them in Adobe Lightroom concentrating on the following aspects of the highlighted areas:

• completely lost areas of visual information
• a visible break in the form of an edge between nearly white and total white
• a colour cast along a fringe bordering the clipped white highlight
• the colour saturation

 I took several sets of images for this excercise all of which seemed to include the sky which showed up on the cameral as highlighted in black so I tried to find a set of images that didn't inluded the sky but found it difficult to find the point at where the highlight clippings started or were other than a edging of a tiny area so I went back to the view including the sky. The following are a set of images taken on my terrace, an image that includes primarily the bamboo plant but with the oak tree in the background with the brighness of the sky showing through the branches.



f/5.0

I took the first image at f/5.0 which is roughly were I noticed the highlight clippings. On closer inspection at 100% magnification the branches area lined with a blue line and the colour of the branches is lighter. There is a contrast between the bamboo leaves in the shade and with the bright sky behind. The image looks quite washed out and seems to have lost some colour saturation,














f/4.5



Next, I increased the exposure for a second shot by one f-stop at f/4.5, at 100% magnification there is complete loss of detail in some of the branches and a loss of colour saturation, also the branches are fringed by a blue line, over the upper right corner of the image there seems to be a white veil which is also reducing saturation














f/5.6

For the next shot I decresed the exposure (from the first shot) by one f-stop to f/5.6. The branches still look as though there is a white film over the upper right corner although is a little improved by decreasing the exposure and there remains the bluish fringe around the branches. The bamboo leaves at the top of the plant look washed out and almost transparent in places.














f/6.30

Again the exposure was decreased by one f-stop to f/6.30. The leaves are still a little transparent but with less loss of definition and colour saturation. There is still the bluish fringe and white veil over the upper right corner of the image but the color saturation is improves slightly again with the decrease in exposure.













 

f/7.10

A final shot was taken by again decreasing by one f-stop to f/7.10. The leaves aren't so washed out and their colour is much improved from the previous images. The definition of the branches is also improved but there is still a hint of a blue fringe so I would have liked to have gone down further with the exposure just to see if the image could be improved further.