Don’t miss the highlights

We often talk about highlight detail as if recording it is some form of quest that many will undertake and few will achieve, but there are some simple steps that we can take to ensure we get the results that we want, with detail where it needs to be.

Let’s start by defining highlight detail. The highlights are the very brightest parts of a scene or an image and the detail is the very subtle variations in tone. When we look at a cloud in the sky on a sunny day, for example, we can see that it’s white but don’t see it as a uniform mass of white. There are tiny variations with areas of very light grey or pale blue that give it some shape and form. It’s these tonal variations that we want to capture in an image so the clouds don’t look like a solid mass of uniform white.

We want highlights to look white without them being so bright that they burn out. That’s the point at which the brightest greys in a scene are rendered white. The problem with burned-out highlights is that you can’t pull back any tonal variation when you’re editing the image; darkening them just creates areas of uniform grey instead of uniform white.

So how do you ensure that you don’t burn out the highlights and you get the detail you want? Read on to find out.

Take a look

The first step in retaining the highlights in an image is