Not too much, I read a bit about using the histogram but I never used it. I take a couple of shots of the same scene, usually I set the aperture and take a couple of pictures with various exposure time, then I look at them in the LCD to see if 1 of them is acceptable. It’s always the same thing, when the sky is nice, the ground is too dark, when the ground has some exposure (but never enough) most if not all the sky is clipped to white.
We talked about me buying gradient filters for landscape but even with a filter, I find it hard to believe that it’s not possible to do better with the camera only.
This is a shot from yesterday and there was plenty of light on the ground with my eyes, plenty. But this was the only way to get a decent sky which is much more exposed in the picture then what my eyes could see. I tried to work it out with a RAW in Darktable, it’s just not doing much magic, the effects will pull too much noise out of the darker parts.
F 5.0
1/250 exposure
18.0 lens
Iso 100
Bellow is the modified version with DT, the bottom part of the picture still somewhat dead… my best result was to turn it into grayscale. I don’t hate the picture but I am disappointed.
if I use a gradient filter, it will pick up the trees and I don’t know how good the picture will be with a gradient in the trees, I don’t want to spend money to be disappointed.
This picture at 6000x4000 looks pretty crappy, the effects are inducing a lot of noise in the ground, it’s ok for a very small dimension image.
@paperdigits But I listen to you if you believe that using the histogram could help me… I will try it.