It's summertime and lots of our photos are going to be shot in direct sunlight. Ugh.

And if that isn't bad enough, many of our shots will be partially under a tree canopy, so the shadow areas will be especially dark.

You've heard me kvetch before about digital cameras' too-limited dynamic range (e.g., cameras can't record the full tonal range of the subject from bright white fabric in direct sunlight to the black hair of people who are shaded by the trees), so no need for more of that.

Short of waiting for an overcast day or going back to color negative film, all we can do is shoot carefully and fix it later in what the video/cinema folks call "post-production". (We call it "PhotoShop", although there are many other programs that work equally well for this.)

When shooting, sometimes one can use direct flash to fill in the shadows, but it usually looks ugly and it doesn't help anything in the frame farther away than the foreground items (unless you're willing to blow out those foreground items).

All that is left for us to do camera-wise, is to try to get the exposure just right. We know we can't record the whole long-scale scene from bright to dark, so we have to make a tough call on how much of the highlight to blow out versus how much of the shadow areas to leave down in the murk.

And this is where using your camera's features for analyzing the exposure are valuable. Pretty much all cameras offer a histogram,

and many, even the little ones, have the display option of "blinking highlights". (When reviewing a photo on the camera's display screen, the portions of the photo that are blown out will, rather than merely showing as pure white, blink white-black-white-black...) I find the blinking highlights especially valuable and use them to quickly check my exposure on nearly every assignment.

For example, after I took shot below, the camera's display showed that much of the wooden deck in the foreground was blinking.

I chose to sacrifice tone and detail from those brightly-lit planks in order to get useable tones in the rest of the photo. I knew that in post-production I'd be able to brighten the midtones (and by doing so pull up some shadow detail), thus making the overall picture look acceptable. One can do this sort of thing with almost any of the simplest picture editing programs, even if they don't allow one to select and control individual sections of the photo.

The other main task in fixing this shot was to soften the tones of the harsh, blown-out foreground planks. Here's the final workup:

I'll describe how fixing the highlights was done with PhotoShop's tools, but there are usually equivalent tools in other programs.

There are two aspects of these blown-out highlights that made them easy to fix. One is that they were all of one hue. The other is that selecting them (with the "magic wand" and "lasso") was easy.

Actually, the area that was easy to select was not JUST the blown-out highlights, which have complex shape and would require varying amounts of feathering at the edges, but rather, it was easy to select those blown-out highlights ALONG WITH adjacent areas of the same hue. Some of those adjacent areas aren't blown-out at all. Some are in the mid-tones.

Take a look at the middle frame below:

My selection was easy to make because it followed the sharp lines of the boards and-- counterintuitively-- I didn't mind that it included areas that don't have blown-out highlights.

The next step was to wash an appropriate color throughout the selection using "levels" (or "curves", if you prefer). To match the orange hue of the wood, I wanted to mix two of the three primary colors: magenta and yellow. This was done by pulling on the triangle for the highlight output levels in both the green and blue channels:

Green and blue channels? Yes. Recall that we are working in "RGB", so we don't have a magenta channel nor a yellow channel. But when we reduce the output level in the G, that is the same as adding more of its opposite: M, or magenta. And same for blue/yellow.

At this point a wash of orange flooded the whole selected area. What had been blown out to full white was now darker and colored a light orange, much like the other planks. I tuned the exact hue of orange by adjusting the G and B channels relative to one another.

At this point one needs to pay attention to the saturation (a vital term in photo work-- it means 'intensity of color'). As usual, I pulled on the output level triangle of the RGB channel to add some gray which reduces saturation. Using that triangle will also darken the selection, so it's necessary to balance it with the other two triangles.

When you try it, you'll find that playing with these three triangles will let you find the best looking highlight color, but there's one more step. Remember that our selection includes areas that aren't blown out and don't need darkening nor added color. You can keep them from getting too dark and strongly colored by pulling the midtones up. Grab that middle triangle in the RBG channel, pull left a bit, and we're done.

Here's another sample of this technique:

Now that you've seen this technique, you'll start noticing examples of it in advertising photos and National Geographic. It's often used to keep color in the highlights of autos and soften the highlights in sunset shots.