Problems with contrast

[Dianthus]

Hi. I'm a noobie and don't know the rules, so forgive me if I do something wrong.

I've got a compact digital camera and it's great - except that it doesn't like high contrasts. For instance, I took a photo at a local church during their flower festival. They had a very attractive decorated cart in the entrance arch so I decided to get a photo of it with the church showing through the arch across a lawn.

Not a good idea . I got the flowery cart beautifully, but everything outside the arch was FAR too washed out and I had to do a lot of post-processing on it to get it to look halfway decent. As you can see, I'm still learning about post-processing .

How can I stop this happening and get a photo which is even throughout?

[Nicole]

What's happening is that there's too much of a difference between how bright it is outside that arch and how dark it is inside it. Your camera can only cope with so big of a difference, and that's not nearly as much as our eyes can.

So to avoid what's happening, you can try a few things. You could try HDR or exposure blending where you take several pictures that expose each of the areas correctly (for example, outside and inside). Then you blend those together in a program like Photoshop or The Gimp. Another option is to add more light to the darker area using a flash. In any case, if you don't want to do a lot of post-processing, the best place to start is to try to make sure that there's less difference between the amount of light in both areas.

[Dianthus]

Originally Posted by Nicole

What's happening is that there's too much of a difference between how bright it is outside that arch and how dark it is inside it. Your camera can only cope with so big of a difference, and that's not nearly as much as our eyes can.

So to avoid what's happening, you can try a few things. You could try HDR or exposure blending where you take several pictures that expose each of the areas correctly (for example, outside and inside). Then you blend those together in a program like Photoshop or The Gimp. Another option is to add more light to the darker area using a flash. In any case, if you don't want to do a lot of post-processing, the best place to start is to try to make sure that there's less difference between the amount of light in both areas.

Thanks. What's HDR? Next time I'll try the flash and see what happens.

That reminds me of another problem I have - with flash. I took some flash photos inside the church and its surrounding buildings and I got a nasty red grainy effect over the whole picture - especially the darker surfaces (see attached - it's been post processed, but you can still see the residue). How can I stop that?

[i speak in math]

HDR is the idea that when the lighting in your scene is more than the camera can handle (deep shadows all the way to bright sunlight), you can take several exposures of the scene and blend them down to one, well-exposed image. There is software to do it for you, like photomatix, or you can do it by hand in PS.

The red cast in your shots with flash is likely a "color-of-light" issue. Indoors, many places use incandescent, or tungsten, lighting. This is a very redish-orange color. Your flash is neutral and near daylight in color. When you use the flash and your white balance is set to flash, everything your flash hits will look like the correct color. But everything your flash doesn't hit, will look red from the tungsten light. Alternatively, if your white balance is set to tungsten, the room will look normal, except where your flash hits, everything will look blue.

There are really 3 ways around mixing the colors like you did. One is to use so much flash and a high shutter speed that none of the tungsten makes it into the picture. Another way is to use no flash at all, but a long shutter with the correct white balance. A third way is to put a color correcting gel over your flash to match the color of the tungsten lighting, then take a normal picture so that there aren't two different color light sources.