3 Solutions For Shooting Against The Light

Shooting against the light has always been a tricky thing in photography: if you choose to set a longer exposure or just to increase the exposure compensation in order to have plenty of light over the near subject, the background will appear burned (overexposed). The other way around, if you choose the right exposure for the background (the usual auto or program mode will do that), then your subject will appear too dark (underexposed). Here are three solutions you can use depending on the situation.

SOLUTION 1

If you are close enough to your subject, like for instance in portrait photography, using the flash even if it is a very sunny day will fix the problem in a very simple and effective way.

SOLUTION 2

But what if your subject is too far away (like far buildings) and you can’t or just don’t want to try a different angle with the sun behind you? Or what if it is night and a lamp illuminates the place? Will you be pleased with the overexposed lamp due to the long exposure needed in night conditions? Some new cameras come with a function called D-Lighting (or adaptive lighting). This function will solve the problem automatically.

SOLUTION 3

But what if your camera does not have this function? The salvation in this case is a Photoshop manipulation.
When shooting, make several frames with different exposures. In my example (with Canon PowerShot A520), the dark photo was made with: aperture F 3.2, exposure time 0.100 sec; and the light one with: aperture F 3.2, exposure time 0.400 sec. It’s much recommended to have a tripod and take the pictures using it because of 2 reasons: a brighter picture may require a longer exposure time (if you don’t want to deal with a lot of noise you will prefer a longer time instead of higher ISO and aperture) so you need to avoid camera shake (no matter how steady your hands are, night condition will always require a tripod), and the second reason: the frames should be taken from the same angle and viewpoint. Unfortunately, at the time I shot the images in this example, I did not have a tripod so the bright image is blured due to camera shake, but I somehow managed to take quite similar frames.In a Photoshop document, place the 2 frames as different layers in such way that the darker one will be under the lighter one. Choose the eraser with a size bigger than the lamp (or whatever your overexposed object is), low hardness and low opacity as shown in the figure. This will softly erase the area around the lamp in the lighter frame revealing the darker frame behind in such way that the 2 images will come together graduated, not suddenly. But the inner portion of the lamp from the darker image is not yet fully revealed. Change the eraser option like this: smaller size to fit only the interior of the lamp, full 100% opacity and 100% hardness.

Once you erase the red marked area, you will notice that even if the pictures come together softly, the colors are not the same. You can adjust the gradient by moving onto the dark image layer, in the menu “Image” -> “Adjustments” select Selective Color. Play around with the “neutrals” until you are satisfied with the color gradient around the lamp. When all this is done, go to the menu “Layer” and select “Merge Visible” (or press Shift + Ctrl+E). This step will merge the 2 images and now, if you are still not satisfied with this result, you can play around with blur tool and healing brush before saving the final image.