Pay attention to the direction of light when editing

Sunday 12 January 2025, 20:02 by Nando Harmsen | 2,542 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

The direction of light is important in a photograph. It creates depth and dimension. When editing, make sure you respect the direction of the light. This is especially important with HDR techniques. Make sure your shadows are where they belong.

Light comes from somewhere. It could be a lamp, flash, or sunlight. This means that light has direction, and you can use that. Light coming straight from the front is often dull and flat. Side lighting creates beautiful shadows. And backlighting can produce beautiful rim light.

If you take a lot of landscape photographs, you often use backlighting. Sunrises and sunsets always involve backlighting. This means you have a lot of contrast, sometimes even too much for the camera. This creates many dark areas.

To prevent those dark areas, you can use HDR techniques. This could mean lifting shadows when editing, or taking an exposure bracket on location. The latter in particular makes it possible to have even the darkest areas properly exposed.

However, be careful when editing, especially with HDR techniques using an exposure bracket. Respect the direction of the light and do not brighten areas that are not lit. That does violence to the photograph.

A poor HDR edit. All the shadows have been lifted, so the light no longer has any direction. Details have been enhanced and saturation increased to mask the flat appearance this creates. This is the typical HDR look that has given the technique such a bad name.

It is fine to lift dark areas slightly. It is not a problem to see some detail in them. But keep the contrast intact. Otherwise, you end up with a flat photograph without directional light. That is not attractive, and it does violence to reality.

An HDR photograph that retains the direction of the light. There are shadows, and the light is only where it belongs. Without HDR techniques, this result would have been impossible or barely possible.
By keeping the shadow areas as actual shadows, the light in the photograph also has direction. It represents reality and gives the photograph much more impact. HDR techniques make it possible to prevent those shadows from becoming completely black. A hint of detail is enough.

HDR techniques are a way of getting around the camera's limitations. But remember that the best HDR photograph is one where you cannot see that it is HDR.

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