"We always see these images like these 3 guys in shadow on the boat trotted out as places we want tons and tons of DR.
I still say you lift the shadows on that shot with a Sony sensor and you still have a bad picture. I've seen very few of these that look good after lifting."
-bboule
This picture is not a good example for a picture I would keep, its just an exercise in the potential of Sony sensors.
Its like an engine you can rev to 9K RPM, it doesn't mean you want to rev it that high all the time but its nice to know its there is you want or need it to
Neither was the shot that quote is from, but it was in a thread about the new Canon 5DS where they were taking new sample RAW shots and trying to recover them.
The OP took a pretty decently exposed shot and showed the recovering "ability" of the sensor by adding EV to the shot and showing an area of about 2% of the frame and how "low noise" and "detailed" it was.
I suggested they use a different image, VERY similar to yours, which is a shot that happens to a lot of us from time to time when we can't learn to use a meter and manually focus perfectly like ggary--a shot where recovery would be beneficial to us feeble users.
Instead of trying it (in a thread about recovery and noise), I was berated with the typical ggary type response.
That this sort of ability--to be able to underexpose something by 3-4-5 stops and then recover it with minimal color losses and noise--is viewed with hate/ignorance/opposition is beyond me.
This means you can meter and expose in an entirely new fashion that should be perfectly acceptable and EMBRACED. You can meter for a sky and let everything else underexpose and then recover the underexposed areas in post. The results are spectacular and almost unbelieveable. Sorry
@Bryston3bsst but some "high quality" $4000 cameras simply cant do it like a Sony sensor equipped camera can.
Having this ability doesn't mean shooters are lazy or that they will ignore common sense, but it does mean they have a more powerful tool to do things other aren't able to. THIS IS A GOOD THING.
With that being said, the OP's shot should have only had shadows recovered so the sky was still exposed well. By just adding EV to the entire frame you allowed the sky to blow out, which is essentially like just metering for the subject--and only gives fuel to ggary. Instead, only recover where you need it--giving you, in one frame, and min. effort in post, both the sky and subject-in-shadows good exposure.
Also, a lot of times when you expose for the subject and the background is bright, the brightness wraps around the subject lowering the contrast/color and the image just isn't that great. So you're left with a washed out subject with no defined edge in a sea of white and there's no room to recover anything either way--you have no information to pull out of the whites.
