Don't Trust Your Camera Preview, Use RAW and Gold-N-Blue Polarizer

Orth an der Donau

Don't Trust Your Camera Preview,

Use RAW, and Gold-N-Blue Polarizer... so many topics in one title.

I wanted to share a story of one picture. Here you can see final result, later at the bottom you will see 2nd version of same frame with different polarization. You may like the other one... I like both, but had to choose one.

I drove to Orth by Danube, not far from Vienna towards Slovakian border, to have a look around, still looking for Autumn, and thought that with late afternoon sun I can get something.

Overall the day and scenery looked quite dull, I did some shots here and there but I am not too happy with them. Real colourful Autumn has still not arrived. Then at one stage I spotted this shed built on water with its reflection and setting sky and reflected in water. I thought then, well, I will come back with at least one picture today. 

70mm, 1/5s, F16, ISO50
No filters

I liked the composition, old wooden shed with lots of texture, it had some atmosphere that captured my attention. The only thing I do not like is advertisement text, which I might in the future remove in photoshop. For now it is there.

Scenery as such is quite tough to capture properly not talking about focal length and f stops. But since I mentione them, this time I wanted tighter frame and I used 70 mm length with my typical f16 to have large depth of field. The problem was tonal range which is really great here. You have really bright sky, not seen by our eyes, then really dark stripe with trees, bushes and the shed and then again really bright water with reflecting sky. Here you can see the picture straight from the camera with no filters used, and what can you say... boring and grey.

70mm, 0.3s, F16, ISO100
Two 2 stops ND grads affecting sky and water

What can be done HDR perhaps, but since I am not a big fan of HDR I decided to open my bag and play with filters. Initial thought was to use two neutral density graduated filters (ND grads) one darkening top of the frame and second affecting the bottom leaving narrow stripe to exposer correctly the shed and darks. 

The difference can be seen immediately. You still have sky and water details but also so much more data in the shed and trees' shadows. New exposure was set for shadows and was 1 2/3 stops higher than previous shot. Note shutter speed change to 0.3s and ISO went up to 100. At this stage I was still looking for perfect exposure. Later I went back to ISO50 again to have maximum picture quality.

Picture looked balanced and with no clipping as such. But camera preview screen showed sky as overexposed. Whites in the sky kept blinking. Well, on JPG they were overexposed, this is what I meant by not trusting the preview. Look at histogram and shoot raw. When RAW file is loaded you will see the difference.

70mm, 4s, F16, ISO50Two 2 stops ND grads affecting sky and water
Gold-N-Blue Polarizer before white balance correction

At this stage I could have stayed with the picture as such, but I needed more punch. It still looked to blue and grey, white balance correction would not be able to fix it. 

Time to use heavy weapon i.e. Gold-N-Blue polarizer from Singh-Ray. This filter can transform absolutely dull scene into something magical... if used properly. Sometimes it may not work, it should be used smart and one has to learn how to use it.... Here is the effect recorded by the camera set to auto white balance.... something completely different from what I saw in the viewfinder. The problem is white balance when camera is not able to calculate it properly. 

If you shoot JPG... you are doomed, if you shoot RAW you can set correct values in post processing. One more thing about Gold-N-Blue polarizer, it takes about 2 stops of light, I had to compensate for it - from 0.3s I had to step down to 2 seconds and because I also lowered ISO to 50, I ended up with 4 seconds exposure which was also good as I wanted to have water wee bit blurred. Picture above is not really what I was after.... but I knew this is only camera preview. I trusted what I saw in the viewfinder with my real eye! Camera recorded 4050 Kelvins with tint -5. 

The trick with Gold-N-Blue polarizer is to remove the tint... in final image I corrected white balance to 4600K and tint... -70! All colours came back!

With curve tool I decreased a bit some highlights, added contrast and a bit of saturation and voila la!

70mm, 4s, F16, ISO50Two 2 stops ND grads affecting sky and water
Gold-N-Blue Polarizer with White Balance correction (Tint  -70)

Here is basically the same picture with same setup but with different polarization, note blues in the water.

70mm, 4s, F16, ISO50Two 2 stops ND grads affecting sky and water
Gold-N-Blue Polarizer with White Balance correction and different polarization

It is up to you to choose one suits you more. Last one is a bit brighter, probably it was shot prior to final one and light outside was changing quite fast and since I was in full manual mode, the difference can be seen.

Summing up, if you shoot raw and trust your settings and not preview and with few filters you can change dull scene into great picture.

Cheers

Jerzy