Episode 152: Meditations about too much Light

In March I got some images from Peter in Thailand. He lives there in a country full of photogenic sites and has often only the time to take a quick shot with his P&S camera without being able to work around some of the obstacles. Specially for the show he made some with the typical problems. In this case it is to much light – or better, too much dynamic range. The difference between tropical sun and deep shadows in this temple is too big.

The blown out areas are not repairable, all the information is lost. I try to get more of the temple mood into the image (forget that I have not been there…….) by turning the overexposure into a glow on top of the Buddhas. If you can’t get rid of it, try more of it. ;-)

A special “curtain vignette” improves the image a bit further.

Of course one can take the puristic stand and say “Don’t rescue an image, do your photography properly!”. But often you’ll have no image then. Some things can be done in a hurry too: underexpose in such a situation. You’ll loose details in the shadows but gain them in the light. A good trade off in most cases. Be familiar with that button on the camera.

The show starts with a look at the level in the donations hat, which is quite high after one and a half week. To get the concept of DONATE FOR MEET THE GIMP! even further into your heads I show how I made the gauge with Wilber slowly filling up. Wolfram Alpha is used to calculate the day of the death of the server.

Then I get a bit into setting up the toolbox in GIMP 2.7 and show how to manage the docks after the “landing zones” have become invisible. And of course there is the challenge!