ETTR Processing in Lightroom

When we shoot ETTR (expose to the right) in bright, harsh light, Lightroom can sometimes get the wrong idea and make a real ‘hash’ of rendering the raw file.

Sometimes it can be so bad that the less experienced photographer can get the wrong impression of their raw file exposure – and in some extreme cases they may even ‘bin’ the image thinking it irretrievably over exposed.

I’ve just uploaded a video to my YouTube channel which shows you exactly what I’m talking about:

The image was shot by my client and patron Paul Smith when he visited the Mara back in October last year,  and it’s a superb demo image of just how badly Lightroom can demosaic a straight forward +1.6 Ev ETTR shot.

Importing the raw file directly into Lightroom gives us this:

But importing the raw file directly into RawTherapee with no adjustments gives us this:

Just look at the two histogram versions – Lightroom is doing some crazy stuff to the image ‘in the background’ as there are ZERO develop settings applied.

But if you watch the video you’ll see that it’s quite straight forward to regain all that apparent ‘blown detail’.

And here’s the important bit – we do so WITHOUT the use of the shadow or highlight recovery sliders.  Anyone who has purchased my sharpening videos HERE knows that those two sliders can VERY EASILY cause undesirable ‘pseudo-sharpening’ halos, and they should only be used with caution.

The way I process this +1.6 stop ETTR exposure inside Lightroom has revealed all the superb mid tone detail and given us a really good image that we could take into Photoshop and improve with some precision localized adjustments.

So don’t let Lightroom control you – you need to control IT!

Thanks for reading and watching.

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