Oops! Another Reason to Shoot in RAW

As the volunteer bench coach, score keeper, and self-appointed photographer for my son’s little league team, I’m flirting with photographic disaster. Last week, I followed my usual routine – balancing camera on scorebook for 6 innings and shooting whenever possible. However, as I began to download the day’s images into my Aperture library, I quickly realized that sometime during the first inning I had inadvertently bumped the control dial on my 40D causing a switch from aperture priority to manual exposure. Almost all of the subsequent images were grossly overexposed. I know what you are thinking – I should have noticed this immediately while reviewing the images on the camera’s LCD…oops!

Rather than send the images to the digital graveyard, I decided to experiment with Aperture and Photoshop to see how much information could be salvaged. After adjusting the exposure and levels in Aperture, I used the Recovery and Highlight sliders to bring some detail back into the image. I then opened each image in Photoshop Elements (using Aperture’s roundtrip feature) and duplicated the background layer twice. The first duplicate layer was converted to black and white and the second duplicate layer was changed to either a Multiply, Color Burn, or Linear Burn blend mode. Here is an example of the results:

While this is not destined for the cover of SI, it does have an interesting pop art feel and it demonstrates the incredible amount of information that is stored in your RAW files.

RAW, Aperture, digital processing

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