F55-clark-quay-no-grad

Shot of Clark Quay before grading the raw file.

2 thoughts on “F55-clark-quay-no-grad”

    1. That’s what the linear raw data looks like when correctly exposed. You have to remember that each stop of exposure has twice as much range as the previous so when you spread 14 stops across 16 bits of data, the brightest stop uses the bulk of the data, as a result your mid tones, shadows and darker parts of the image (which actually make up most of the final image) are squashed into the lower end of the data range and thus the linear image looks very dark. When you convert linear raw to a standard gamma you squash your highlights significantly and then expand the rest of the range to fill your chosen gamma curves range. I’ll have to post the over exposed raw shots because these show how the brightest stop contains almost the same dynamic range as the entire 13 stops below combined. f you scene has a 10 stop range, you could expose it so that you only used the top stop of the cameras range to record the 10 stops of the scene. The raw data would look almost entirely white, but from that you could extract the full 10 stop scene, because the top stop is allocated double the data of the one below and so on.

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