How do I prevent illuminated building signs from blowing out in night city photos?
Asked 4/30/2017
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When shooting city scenes at dusk or night, bright building signs and lights often lose detail or look smeared while the rest of the scene needs a much longer exposure. I’m already bracketing exposures, but the illuminated names on top of buildings still don’t look as clear as they do in the darkest frame. What’s the best way to handle this in-camera and in post-processing?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
9y ago
2 Answers
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They're being blurred out by camera motion as much as they are by being overexposed. The obvious solution is to use a sturdy tripod. Good tripod technique for such long exposures includes a way to release the shutter without touching the camera. For shutter times between about 1/100 second to 1 second mirror lockup, if your camera has a mirror, will also help to reduce blur caused by vibrations resulting from mirror movement.
When using a sturdy tripod and exercising proper technique, there should not be any perceivable difference in the framing of the scene from one shot to the next.
Depending on exactly how you are combining the two images, you can also bring down the highlights in the brighter exposure before combining them.
Originally by user15871. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user15871
9y ago
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This is mainly a dynamic-range problem, and possibly a camera-shake problem too.
To keep detail in bright building signs, make one exposure specifically for the highlights so the lettering is just below clipping. That exposure may be extremely short compared with the one needed for the darker buildings and sky. Then blend it with longer exposures for the rest of the scene using HDR or manual masking.
A sturdy tripod is important, because some of the softness can come from motion blur during long exposures. Use solid tripod technique and, if possible, trigger the shutter without touching the camera. On DSLR cameras, mirror lock-up can also help reduce vibration.
In post, you can also reduce highlights in the brighter exposure before blending, but once the sign is fully blown out there is no detail to recover. The cleanest result comes from capturing that detail in a separate shorter exposure and combining it with the brighter frames.
So: stabilize the camera, expose one frame for the signs/lights, take additional longer frames for the darker areas, and blend them carefully.
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