advice on dynamic range and blooming wanted

[Neil Sadler]

firstly, forgive me if i'm using the term blooming incorrectly, i'm still pretty new to this photography malarky.
So I took the following picture today and naturally given the composition and the position of the sun experienced some issues with the dynamic range as the highlights and the area around the women is rather blown out due to their position in line with the low sun.
I understand that this is always inevitable to some extent but was wondering if anything could/can be done to combat the problem either in technique or in post production now?
It was shot using a panasonic lumix FZ28 superzoom camera, would it have been less of an issue on a higher quality dslr with a larger and better sensor? Would shooting in RAW likely have made a significant difference?



any help would be much appreciated

Neil

info:
Camera: panasonic lumix FZ28
Exposure: 1/1000
Aperture: f/4
Focal Length (35mm equivalent): 27 mm
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Flash: Off, Did not fire

[Doug Pardee]

Originally Posted by Neil Sadler

I understand that this is always inevitable to some extent but was wondering if anything could/can be done to combat the problem either in technique or in post production now?

Fill flash. Or other techniques for increasing the light on your side of the subject, such as using a reflector.

Other than that, not really.

would it have been less of an issue on a higher quality dslr with a larger and better sensor? Would shooting in RAW likely have made a significant difference?

No, not really. You might get a bit more "dynamic range", but not enough to make a noticeable difference when shooting into the sun. Nothing can handle that. Your eyes can even handle it—remember the admonition never to look into the sun?

[teaking]

I think alot of RAW shooters and photoshop users around here would promote this as a good case for RAW and there probably right lol.

There is a method where you expose the image so the histogram is pushed up to the right hand side but making sure you do not blow out the high lights or clip the image so sections are pure white. The background may look dark at this point. Once transfered to your PC you can import the RAW into photoshop or other image editing programs and push up the exposure of the background using adjustment layers or dialogues depending on the program your using.

As RAW captures trillions of colours it has a higher dynamic range and will allow you recover some exposure. How much depends though and you can never recover clipping or blown out high lights.

Hope this may have helped.

[Neil Sadler]

thanks guys, that has pretty much confirmed what I expected to hear which is quite reassuring. I take it more information on the mentioned technique is readily available on the net? I'm still rather inexperienced with editing as well

[teaking]

Yeah alot of RAW users I believe use the expose to the right technique as it captures the highest dynamic range for post processing if you put it through google you should find all you need to know.

But I havent really used this technique maybe some of the people who use RAW could tell you if im on the right path here lol.