Lack of contrast

Kev M

Kev M

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You can call me Sir.
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I've got several shots from this weekends racing that are completely flat and lacking in contrast. More so the ones from early on in the day when the cloud and rain was at it's worst. Things picked up a bit in the afternoon when I also changed lenses due to some bad condensation issues but I don't know if thisis coincedence or something else. What causes such a problem, is it lack of light, do lenses have an effect, or is it poor metering on my part? I stuck with centre weighted for most of the day as I thought it was important to expose the car properly more than the sky. Is it my technique which has let me down or is it something that can affect everyone?


Kev
 
Do you have an example Kev.

Somethimes you can bring some of the contrast out through sharpening, using large radius USM.
 
Here's one fshed out of the bin

PICT1408a.jpg


It's binned for other reasons than the contrast but it's typical of a lot I came away with.
 
I suspect the lighting was the major reason. Contrast is light and shade but in dull weather the light is very flat and you will need to add some punch in post. I often get the same problem with macro shots when shooting in diffused daylight.

A quick play with Highlight/Mid/Shadow added some punch to your shot:
km_retouch.jpg


The histrogram showed not much happening in the shadows so I guess you could have dialed in a bit of -EC but exposing to the right isn't such a bad thing as you get more tonality to play with later anyway.
 
I have to agree with pxl8 here about the light being flat.
A flash would have helped on such a dull day.

Try tweeking the levels, here I used the grey colour picker and selected a grey area from the car next to hi-vis man.

USM at 100, 0.2, 0 applied 5 times in lightness channel in lab colour.
USM at 20, 30, 0 to help make the subject pop, (large Radius) .
Convert to SRGb for web.

KevM.jpg


The large radius USM helps bring out the contrast in the example above.
 
Thanks guys perhaps it wasn't all down to me then. I did dial in -1/3 as my camera tends to favour the highlights but perhaps I could have gone further.

I never new USM could be used for things over than sharpening until now. That's something else for me to not understand.
 
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