Yeah thats what I thought. He said exposure adjustment with raw is practically lossless but it didn't make much sense to me. Guess I'll head down to the shop and pick up a few Cokins. I like spending time post processing so that isn't really the issue but I'm not a huge fan of HDR for shots that need to look natural.
Any recommendations on grade? And should I get soft or hard edge? I'm thinking soft because I'll probably be using them for uneven horizons as well as straight ones. Will a soft edge be obvious if you shoot say a sunset over the sea?
I'm also considering buying a CPL but the good ones are outrageously expensive. Will a < $50 filter get the job done or are they just not worth it?
I would say that your friend is more incorrect on the whole issue than he is correct. Having extra latitude in the RAW file for making adjustments is awesome, no doubt. But the best photograph will always be had by taxing that latitude as sparingly as possible. When people start thinking, " I can just use the Grad filter in PP...", that's when they start ending up with once-in-a lifetime shots that have crummy, irreparable skies because they took a gamble that they could pull back detail in PP. It's not that, on occasion, I don't pull back highlights from the RAW data... but I rarely
rely on it because there's really no sure-fire way to definitively say exactly how much can be reclaimed.
HDR is a great way to deal with skies if a Grad ND isn't being used... but this relies on there being a bare minimum of movement in the scene to produce a truly good HDR photograph. For me, even a shred of ghosting is just not acceptable... That means that in situations when the wind is blowing around trees or plants, or there are moving animals or people, or when the clouds are moving fast in the sky... an HDR will show unsightly flaws without a whole ton of extra editing (i.e. pulling the HDR-processed shot back into Photoshop with the original exposures in layers and tediously masking off portions of the photo... and even this doesn't always work out).
Grad NDs are still indispensable tools, in my opinion. And, as bazooka mentioned, it can be rather fulfilling to tame a huge dynamic range in a landscape entirely within the camera...
knowing that you've nailed the shot. Whereas with reclaiming detail in PP or merging HDRs, you never really know for sure that you were successful until you're back home off-loading the shots from your memory card.
I use the soft-grad filters, as most of the landscapes I shoot have uneven horizons. The soft-grads do a great job of feathering the gradient over a relatively wide area of the frame. They are also a bit more flexible... capable of being employed creatively in unusual situations to hold back a tad bit of light in a corner of the frame or balance the light from a sun-lit gorge cliff with shadowed side of a gorge. Hard grads are more dedicated to flat horizons and aren't good for much else... though for sunsets over the ocean, they would indeed be preferable. Nonetheless, soft grads can handle the job... and they are much more versatile overall.
As far as a CPL, I used to use a real cheap $20 Sunpak CPL from Best Buy. Despite the moans and groans of nay-sayers, it worked just fine. I now use slightly more expensive Tiffens (abt $40, if I recall correctly). The Tiffen is better... no doubt... but not by all that much. A $40 to $50 CPL should do you alright...
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