blinking areas in Photoshop CS5

[ventodimare]

Hi,
in my nikon D80, when I review a pic I can choose to see the histrogram or the blinking highlights (the high lights that have been blown out appear as blinking white areas).

Is there any way to be able to open a pic (raw) in photoshop CS5 and to see those blinking highlights?

Cheers

[FrankMi]

Hi,
in my nikon D80, when I review a pic I can choose to see the histrogram or the blinking highlights (the high lights that have been blown out appear as blinking white areas).

Is there any way to be able to open a pic (raw) in photoshop CS5 and to see those blinking highlights?

Cheers

Hi ventodimare, you can use Bridge in CS5 to open the image in Adobe Camera Raw. The histogram has two little triangles above the highlights and shadows ends ot the histogram. Clicking on these triangles will identify in blue and areas in the image that are too dark and in red, any areas in the image that are too bright. As you adjust Recover, Fill Light, and other sliders, to can see the red and blue image indicators get larger or smaller. Hope this helps!

[Colin Southern]

Hi ventodimare, you can use Bridge in CS5 to open the image in Adobe Camera Raw. The histogram has two little triangles above the highlights and shadows ends ot the histogram. Clicking on these triangles will identify in blue and areas in the image that are too dark and in red, any areas in the image that are too bright. As you adjust Recover, Fill Light, and other sliders, to can see the red and blue image indicators get larger or smaller. Hope this helps!

Hi Ventodimare,

Keep in mind also though that the "blinkies" on the camera are based on the in-camera created JPEG, not the RAW file. Just because an area is shown as being blown on the Camera doesn't mean that the same area will necessarily be blown on the RAW file (there can be up to about a 2-Stop safety margin).

[ventodimare]

Hi,
thanks to you both! Great tip. As my pc is not very powerful, I was wondering if you know a freeware program that opens a raw and shows simply the pic, its histogram and the blinking.
I have tried IrfanView and FsViewer and others but none seems to have the combination offered by Adobe Camera Raw

Have a nice day and thanks!

[Colin Southern]

Hi,
thanks to you both! Great tip. As my pc is not very powerful, I was wondering if you know a freeware program that opens a raw and shows simply the pic, its histogram and the blinking.
I have tried IrfanView and FsViewer and others but none seems to have the combination offered by Adobe Camera Raw

Have a nice day and thanks!

Not off the top of my head -- there are a few other fairly powerful (and free) RAW converters available though.

[FrankMi]

opens a raw and shows simply the pic, its histogram and the blinking.

Hi - - - say, could I get you to go to Forum Actions at the top of this page and in Edit Profile, add your real first name unless you prefer to be called vent.....?

The same functionallity is available in Adobe Lightroom at a much lower cost.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi there "ventodimare",

Could you do us a favour please and Edit (your) Profile and put a first name in the Real Name field? It helps us keep the place friendly, but do accept my apologies in the (hopefully unlikely) event that "ventodimare" is your first name

As my pc is not very powerful, I was wondering if you know a freeware program that opens a raw and shows simply the pic, its histogram and the blinking.
I have tried IrfanView and FsViewer and others but none seems to have the combination offered by Adobe Camera Raw

Well, have you tried Nikon's ViewNX2? Even if you don't have the CD that came with the D80, it is downloadable from Nikon's website and is free.

I use it to review my shots, check histogram and clipping.

It doesn't do "blinkies", but if you are viewing a RAW image thus;

(note Luminance and RGB histograms)

and hit the H key, it displays the colour channels that are clipped in the Highlights thus;


and if you then use the S key, it shows the Shadows that are clipped, thus;


Also, if you click and hold anywhere on the image, it gives you instant 100% view to check focus and noise thus;


It also allows you to check the Focus Point(s) selected, thus;


I can't say what it is like on a low power computer, but as it is free, why not try it?

I don't normally use it to do any editing, preferring ACR for that, which is no problem, you can add Open With applications for use thus;


As you can see, I quite like it

I also use the NikonTransfer2 to get images off the card and into a main and back up location in one go - you can get that free off the website too.

Cheers,

[bobrobert]

Hi Ventodimare,

Keep in mind also though that the "blinkies" on the camera are based on the in-camera created JPEG, not the RAW file. Just because an area is shown as being blown on the Camera doesn't mean that the same area will necessarily be blown on the RAW file (there can be up to about a 2-Stop safety margin).

After using the UNI white balance for a while I found that there is about 2/3 of a stop difference in the jpeg histogram in the camera and the raw histogram in ACR. Meaning that when you look at the histogram in camera and the hump is touching the right hand side then in reality the image is 2/3 stop underexposed. The blinkies settings aren't explained by any camera manufacturer by they are almost certainly conservative so blinking highlights in clouds wont be a problem and using something like ACR or Lightroom means you can rescue up tp 3 stops of overexposure. This means that there is plenty of elbow room to correct exposure. though you want to get it "correct" at the time.

[Colin Southern]

After using the UNI white balance for a while I found that there is about 2/3 of a stop difference in the jpeg histogram in the camera and the raw histogram in ACR. Meaning that when you look at the histogram in camera and the hump is touching the right hand side then in reality the image is 2/3 stop underexposed. The blinkies settings aren't explained by any camera manufacturer by they are almost certainly conservative so blinking highlights in clouds wont be a problem and using something like ACR or Lightroom means you can rescue up tp 3 stops of overexposure. This means that there is plenty of elbow room to correct exposure. though you want to get it "correct" at the time.

Hi Robert,

It's one of those areas where the theory and practice can vary a bit. In theory, folks say you can push the exposure further than what may initially be apparent on the in-camera jpeg (and indeed this can often be needed in high DR scenes). The bit that they don't often mention though is that as you start to push the sensor closer and closer to saturation, you start to operate in non-linear regions of the sensors response curve which (considering also that it's likely that one channel will be in this region more than the others), may give a net result that you can get some weird highlight colour shifts than can be nigh on impossible to completely null out.

In practice - personally - for high dynamic range scenes - I do push the exposure into this area, but for less extreme examples, I often just rely on the blinkies; although I know I can push things further exposure wise, for me, they just seem to tie in fairly close with the "nice" areas of the response curve (and many seem to forget that the camera is usually capturing far more dynamic range than they really need -- so it's usually not a problem to dig a litle of that from the shadow areas) (technically it's not as clean, but in practice, it's often perfectly OK).