wolfe with an e's blog
Chapter 17: HD glow? Or no?
The Leica Q2 Monochrom journal.
The glow in the sky at the horizon or at the edges of a subject is a natural phenomenon. However, it can get out of hand in editing. Some look at this phemonon as a curse. Others see it as an effect. And you’ll commonly see gaudy Instagram photos where the hi-def is overdone creating unnatural halos around subjects. Heck, for that matter you commonly see it on fine art prints too. My personal thought is that the glow is not a sin and can be tastefully enhanced.
As to the idea that it’s an effect, let’s go back to Henri Cartier Bresson’s work. He didn’t develop or print his own work. That was by Georges Fèvre up to about 1967 and Voja Mitrovic afterward. In [Madrid Spain 1933]9(https://americansuburbx.com/2010/11/theory-henri-cartier-bressons-last.html) you can plainly see the glow around most of the heads in the image. This was likely done with a printing technique called dodging where a small tool was used to physically block light from the enlarger when exposing the print to lighten areas of the image. Is it really that noticeable to you? Or is it noticeable because I brought it up? And why was it used?
Many factors about HCB’s work were not based on fine-art photography, but on news photography. He’s the man who made the world take the 35mm Leica camera seriously. Shooting with grainy Tri-X, his images worked well for the shoddy printing of newspapers of the day. Dodging brought out the subjects and made his images pop at a time where newspapers could only print in monotone that looked more liked a muddle of gray.
As we moved into digital, the limited tones and harsh compression of out-of-the-camera JPEGs added their own glow where shadows and highlights meet. RAW has given us more control over the glow since we have more tones to work with and can choose compression ratios when exporting our edited RAW files.
And while digital brought with it the ability to reduce excessive glow, it also brought with it the ability to make it worse. It’s a common reason that pros like Steve McCurry shun the extremes of HD. In Lightroom the Texture, Clarity and Dehaze sliders can emphasize or de-emphasize the glow. It seems that we’ve been trained to drag any slider to the right and add more of whatever to the image. But we can just as easily drag any of these three sliders slightly left to see if we can get more natural results.
In the image at the start of this entry, you can definitely see the glow along the horizon. I reduced clarity and increased dehaze to try to keep it looking natural, but still give some range within the sky. Eliminating the haze entirely would have resulted in a really boring gray sky.
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Photography Leica Q2 Monochrom