Excercise: Managing tone

This exercise could be performed on any image, ideally one which actually needs some of the adjustments mentioned.

I will shoot in raw, even though I am still getting to grips with raw, this is an ideal opportunity to learn more.

• Set the black point and the white point by first adjusting exposure. Make sure shadow clipping and highlight clipping warnings are activated
• Assess and if necessary adjust the brightness of the mid-tones. There is a choice of methods, including exposure, brightness, and tone curve.
• Assess and if necessary adjust the contrast, experiment with both contrast and tone curve.
• If necessary, make corrections to localised areas.

This image was shot at 31mm, ISO 200, f/25 and a shutter speed of 1/20. There were very little highlight clippings just showing on the blue kayak and the two white areas at the back of the speed boat. I made sure the highlight clipping tool was on and moved the exposure slider to just before the clipping. As I have used the contrast and brightness sliders before I chose to experiment with the contrast and tone curve, I found this to be more effective as it seems to allow more detail with the 4 sliders for highlights, lights, darks, shadows. As I adjusted the sliders remembering an earlier exercise with the linear curve. I noticed straight away the removal of the shadow created by the boat house stretching out into the water, the colours in the image are maintained by not adjusting them at all and the image as a whole seemed improved as the darker area was opened up.