How much can be recovered

[Tringa]

I was out yesterday evening trying to get a shot of the Milky Way. I knew at the outset I was being optimistic - it was still way too early for the MW to show well and there was some high cloud.

I started taking shots of the village at different settings and then, after I uploaded them to the PC, started to play about with them.

The first shot here is 20 seconds, f7.1, ISO 100 and clearly it is very underexposed and there is virtually nothing to see.



I wondered what I could squeeze out this shot in pp and I managed this -



I'm not suggesting this effort is in any way a good shot but it I found it surprising just how much can be got from an almost black image.

Dave

[Shadowman]

Nice effort.

[MrB]

It is quite astonishing, Dave. The results of similar experimentation are shown in my post here:

Exposure?

Cheers.
Philip

[Tringa]

I remember seeing your post but had forgotten about it. I'd like to see where digital photography will be in 20 years time.

It doesn't seem that long ago when a sensor with a few megapixels was the norm (the first digital camera I bought, an Olympus Camedia C700) has 2 Mega pixels, and getting an acceptably noise-free shot above an ISO of 800 was limited to very few cameras.

Dave

[dennybeall]

You've illustrated one reason I usually shoot in raw. There is always an amazing amount of info hidden in the dark areas. Blown out is blown out but dark isn't really dark............