I had a church gig tonight - taking pictures at Easter Fire Ceremony prior to the Easter Vigil service. This was uncharted territory for me. I selected my prime lens because that's the fastest lens I own (50mm fixed, f/1.8) and set ISO at 800. I took about half my shots with flash and half relying only on reflected light from the rather large fire. I was shooting in RAW and stumbled onto a trick with adjust blacks (blind luck) worth sharing.
For flash shots I was constantly making flash-compensation adjustments to avoid blowing out foreground faces. At least one full stop; sometimes more. All pictures, with or without flash were underexposed.
You know, with RAW you can actually make these look almost like early evening shots. I didn't want that. It was night (actually twilight) and I wanted it to look "real". I found that if I used the slider to increase blacks to the point of severely clipping that side of the histogram, the highlights were not affected that much and I was able to get the sky back the way I wanted it (darker).
When I was making my adjustments in PSE I found that the combination of increasing blacks in RAW and levels adjustments in PSE for non-foreground faces produced some unnatural skin tones. I had to make two different adjustments to correct this.
I selected the background faces (strong magenta cast) and put those on a new layer; I used adjust color for skin tones on that layer --- just playing with the sliders, I didn't really know what I was doing.
I then dropped back down to the layer below that and used Hue/Sat to reduce the saturation of the color red and slightly tweaked lightness.
I was pleased with how this came out. I do have a selection error in the face partially covered by the candle in this example I am posting -- there's some green in there I need to get rid of. But, now I know what to do -- only 40 more to go
Rusty
For flash shots I was constantly making flash-compensation adjustments to avoid blowing out foreground faces. At least one full stop; sometimes more. All pictures, with or without flash were underexposed.
You know, with RAW you can actually make these look almost like early evening shots. I didn't want that. It was night (actually twilight) and I wanted it to look "real". I found that if I used the slider to increase blacks to the point of severely clipping that side of the histogram, the highlights were not affected that much and I was able to get the sky back the way I wanted it (darker).
When I was making my adjustments in PSE I found that the combination of increasing blacks in RAW and levels adjustments in PSE for non-foreground faces produced some unnatural skin tones. I had to make two different adjustments to correct this.
I selected the background faces (strong magenta cast) and put those on a new layer; I used adjust color for skin tones on that layer --- just playing with the sliders, I didn't really know what I was doing.
I then dropped back down to the layer below that and used Hue/Sat to reduce the saturation of the color red and slightly tweaked lightness.
I was pleased with how this came out. I do have a selection error in the face partially covered by the candle in this example I am posting -- there's some green in there I need to get rid of. But, now I know what to do -- only 40 more to go
Rusty