low contrast?

[Dread Pirate Roberts]

To my eye most of my shots out of the camera have little contrast. I've been adding it in post processing lately.

What are my biggest mistakes if you can tell me?

The following shot is typical (I guess it's over exposed). It was taken with the nifty 50 so I don't think it's light directly hitting the glass.

Image 1 is a shot straight from the cam. Shot as a jpeg in standard not vivid.
Histogram for it showing it's right shifted.

Image 2 is after post processing. Using curves to shift the histogram left a bit and stretch it out to use the dynamic range. Also sharpened amount 20 and radius 50, also amount 80 and radius 1.

I'm leaning towards shooting raw in future but I think I'm doing lots more wrong than that!

In case you're wondering my kid is angry that I'm taking so many photos of him and making him walk around the botanic gardens on his school holiday while I take photos:D

[Visual Reality]

What you're seeing is real life. Adding contrast/blacks in PP is what makes it pop.

[Rooz]

lots of reasons for lack of contrast. lens, aperture, light hitting the front element, in cam settings etc etc etc. that to me looks overexposed which is kinda indicateds in the histogram aswell. did you shoot in manual or add any EV ?

its also a tough shot cos all the colours are light. so there isnt really any blacks, or even any really dark colours, for the cam to meter off.

[T06]

That is a hard shot to take for an example.Another thing I'd like to mention is if you aint doing raw then be wary , don't bother with the contrast & the rest of the shift thing, just my opinion of coarse. Another real hard thing as mentioned is picking exposure, it changes within seconds so even if you use your in camera meter it may be out by 1/5 of a second, depends on the clouds i guess.;) Getting the drift now mate. Seriously I bought the D200 in 06, the last camera i had was a canon T50 that i bought in the 80's with a Sigma & a Mackinon Lens. Never read a book about photography ever & have taken a shitload of pics & learnt from doing it. My advice here is friendly & not one upmanship just do it. Experiment until your hard drive complains, why, because it costs nothing. hell i can't wait until I read all of these good books everyone keeps harping on about, maybe i'll learn where to park my lens.:D

[Dread Pirate Roberts]

Thank you.

I had wondered if aperture was also a factor as I thought my wider aperture shots have less contrast than the F8ish shots. Most of my shots are a bit like looking through a haze.

To be fair I'm usually using the "superzoom", often with direct sun impinging on it (no lens hood) and often a bit overexposed so I guess I shouldn't be surprised by low contrast.

That particular shot was aperture priority, for some reason +1 EV. I probably just looked up from shooting dark roses and grabbed the happy snap of my boy.

The cam settings are still factory default. I'm wondering about shooting vivid jpegs for happy snaps and raw for when I'm going to try too hard.

[XaiLo]

Dread Pirate Roberts, I'm going out on a limb here to say you are not doing anything wrong per se. What I mean is you are just exposing the images the way you like them. I have a similar issue except I tend to under expose slighty. I think it's a war between the right brain and left brain.

Histograms are very cool but they also need to be understood in context with the composition. The original histogram indicactes there's no information beyond the the 3/4 tone mark indicated by the flat line but the real issue can be found between the 1/4 tone and half tone marks. The amplitude show that there is a lot of (clipping)* going on. That's what you have to watch out for here because in this case that's where the majority of the information is for this composition.

*This is not clipping in the true sense of the meaning but the net effect is almost the same. Because there is no shadow information the lights have a washed out appearence.

[Dread Pirate Roberts]

That makes sense Xailo. In laymans terms so many pixels of the same brightness value that it's literally off the chart.

Now the dumb question that follows:
When I get images with massive amplitudes but very narrow histograms there's nothing I can do camera wise to fix it is there? Apart from recomposing the shot from a different angle perhaps. The only fix is in post? Is that a sure indication you need to go raw to get the extra bits to differentiate those values so you can modify them in post?

[XaiLo]

I'm on my way to church Dread Pirate Roberts, I'll answer your question when I get back.

[Rooz]

hard to tell in this one mate cos you've OE by a full stop and there isnt much you can do to change that given its in jpeg.

there's lots you can do to adjust it "as shot" in most circumstances. metering is usually a great place to start. if you arent getting the result you want in cam, switch to spot metering and meter off the part of the image you want spot on. in the above image this may have cost you lots of clipped highlights in the background but that doesnt bother me personally if the main subject is exposed right.

[Dread Pirate Roberts]

You're up early Rooz.

If I understand Xailo correctly though even if I'd exposed correctly that shot would have had poor contrast because all the pixels have similar brightness values. A narrow high histogram.

I think to fix it I might have had to recompose trying to introduce a dark background by shooting with the sun behind me or something.

I hope I'm not way off track here but I'm trying hard to get a handle on histograms and what they can tell me to get better shots.

[Rooz]

correct on all points above. :) you understand perfectly mate, its just this one shot thats really difficult to expose nicely regardless. the best thing to do is take muliple pictures using same settigns and different metering modes.

remember that the 50 contrast just starts to kick in at around 2.8, you really need it to be at f4 from my experience to be "contrasty" right out of cam.

[XaiLo]

Thanks for helping out guys... DPR, I read some where over at lumious landscapes a scene contains 8 stops of information but the camera can only record 5. Big problem and it gets woarse once you factor in reflectance and light intensity. Three quarters of the image information is above medium gray making the overall image highly reflective. Additionaly the light source in this case being the Sun, its intensity can range from an average of 75,000 lux to an excess of 120,000 lux on a given surface. All this basically to say this is why we are encouraged to shoot in either the early morning or at dusk when the light is much more cooperative. :) As you mention there are ways to get around this and as a photographer I guess it's our job to figure out how. ;)

[T06]

Dread what software have you to edit with. My reasoning is get some decent software & play with your raw files in it, you will be quite surprised at what you can do. At the mo I'm into Aperture & am in awe of what this software can do as far as contrast & exposure go, not to mention the fine tuning too is quite eye opening.

[Dread Pirate Roberts]

T06 I'm so darn new to this photography stuff I'm kinda overwhelmed. I've been trying to frantically to teach myself for about 5 months now.

I've got Capture NX and have just started trying to learn the interface. I'm getting competent for an amateur at Photochop CS2. I haven't installed any add ons to let photochop handle NEF files (I gather they're available though). I'm reluctant to introduce another peice of software yet.

[XaiLo]

Dread Pirate Roberts, I'd go ahead and load up ACR a.k.a. (Adobe Camera Raw) the tools there will make life infinately easier. Photoshop is great but it takes a minute to utilize what it has to offer. ACR can also manipulate jpeg images quite handily imo your doing yourself a disservice by not implementing it into your work flow. Try it I think you'll really like it. :)

[Rooz]

personally, i'd stick with one program and learn how to use it well b4 using anything else. personally i find NX much much easier to use for adjusting photos and your RAW components than CS2. all that said, LR is by far the easiest of any of them imo. you can get a photo looking magic in seconds with the sliders. its a breeze to use.

i only use CS3 for the odd cloning job, adding text, frames etc.