Expose To The Right With Processing In The Digital Darkroom

Before and After

Hi and welcome to my blog.  Today I want show how I work in my digital darkroom with a file that has been exposed to the right.  The whole idea about exposing to the right is to create a digital file that has as much information possible. The concept is you push exposure to the right as far as possible without clipping (losing) any information to the highlights then develop it in post, much like we did with film negatives.

When you expose to the right, be careful to not over expose too much, because when a highlight becomes 100% white it contains Zero information.  This means you can never recover any information from that white area.  Underexposed areas that go black, can be opened up (pushed to the right) and you can recover some information in the shadows, but you may find yourself dealing with noise issues. Lastly, when a file is exposed to the right properly, it’s very simple to pull down the exposure to create rich blacks, but you cannot easily make a black area white. Sounds much more difficult than it is, just read the histogram, and dial the exposure to the right without clipping any of the information and you have it.

With that out-of-the-way, I want to share with you the extreme control you can achieve when working inside Photoshop. I am a huge fan of the Curves tool and I use it for everything. Many people find themselves intimidated by the curve tool. I hope that the workflow I show you in the video will help to change your fears of what I think is arguably the most important tool inside Photoshop. There is a curves tool inside Lightroom and I use it much in the same way as I do in Photoshop. However when you use curves in Photoshop, you get to use the power of layer masks. This is because the mask is automatically applied every time you use the curves adjustment tool. It sounds complex but it is so simple. Just watch the video below and let me know what you think.

I hope you all have a great day and I hope you enjoy the lesson. Thomas Shue