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![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.artistrichardcuster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/MG_3762-3.jpg\" "\\"_MG_3762-3\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nAs you can see, the exposure on this did not come out like I would have liked (a perfect candidate for Zone System, perhaps?).\u00a0\u00a0 I took this photo using center-weighted average metering.\u00a0 This metering mode meters the light from center portion of the viewfinder and begins to feather outward, taking into account the edges but placing less weight on those readings the further it gets from the center.\u00a0 The result is that the reading is based more on the light that is in the center, which in this case was the high cloud just to the right of the low cumulus cloud.\u00a0 The explains why the cumulus cloud top is close to being blown out in some areas.\u00a0 The high contrast of the scene also left the ground rather dark.\u00a0 I liked the composition, but initially gave up on it because it was going to require some major tweaking in order to produce a nice photograph.<\/p>\n
My first impulse was to correct the white balance.\u00a0 I pretty much always stick with the “Daylight” setting on my camera.\u00a0 The reason for this is that experience has shown me that using the Auto setting on white balance almost always yields incorrect results.\u00a0 Correcting the incorrect values on Auto white balance shots has proven to be more difficult.\u00a0 I have found that if I use a straight setting that even if the white balance is not correct, correction in post processing is much easier and yields more acceptable results.\u00a0 Also, having correct white balance helps with the tonality when the image is converted to black and white, which was the next step I took.<\/p>\n
The ground, of course, was too dark.\u00a0 To fix that I used the graduated filter tool to fix the exposure of the ground.\u00a0 I made the ground lighter and tweaked the contrast a little bit.\u00a0 This helped to achieve a balance between ground and sky in terms of exposure, but I wasn’t quite done there.\u00a0 The sky was rather light, and I needed to set the mood (after all, the Sumerian god of thunder deserves something serious!) so I turned down the blue filter, which made the sky nice and dark.\u00a0 Up to this point these things I did can also be done via traditional means with the use of filters and dodging and burning.<\/p>\n
Where I had to go digital was with the clouds in the sky.\u00a0 The light meter takes things down to 18% gray.\u00a0 If you meter off a pure white element, the meter takes that into account and reduces the light given off to match 18% gray.\u00a0 It then figures out the exposure necessary to achieve 18% gray.\u00a0 So, anything darker in the actual scene is going to be much darker in capture by the camera.\u00a0 It’s that simple.\u00a0 The clouds in the center were not 18% gray…\u00a0 they were just a few shades darker than white.\u00a0 I had to use the tone curve in order to brighten these clouds.\u00a0\u00a0 I pumped up the highlight slider, which lightens the highlights throughout the whole photograph.\u00a0 This caused the top of the cumulus cloud to become blown out.\u00a0 Since I knew the highlights in that region weren’t blown out, they could be saved my other means.<\/p>\n
After fixing the high clouds, I went in to burn down the highlights in the cumulus cloud so we could see the detail of its fluffy little rolls.\u00a0 This parallels exactly with dodging and burning in the darkroom, although I have better control in Lightroom than even in Photoshop over this process.\u00a0 This was probably the longest part of the whole process…\u00a0 getting the burn to just the right level and trying to stay inside the lines (flashes of being scolded for not doing it in kindergarten suddenly fill my brain) with the brush weren’t easy.<\/p>\n
I went digital again with the final tweaks.\u00a0 The sun on the grass gave it a tonal range that was quite close to the clouds in the sky, but there were some shadows in there.\u00a0 I needed to tweak the color levels to get the tonal range on the ground just right.\u00a0 The very last thing I did was crop the image a little to bring a little more balance to the composition.\u00a0 All told, I spent about an hour on this particular image and I achieved full dynamic range.<\/p>\n