I didn't notice anywhere on the forum a section that shows before and after examples.
For example I royally screwed up the exposure on this shot, but instead of deleting it, I tried to squeeze as much dynamic range out the file in LR5. I'm quite happy with the results. Please feel free to share some of your examples.
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BUT I don't think you screwed up the exposure, I think you got it right. There's a very wide dynamic range in that scene and the highlights are in the sky. You exposed quite well for the highlights and I think you would have started to lose detail in the brightest parts of the clouds if you had given it any more exposure. There's a lot you can bring up out of the shadows with Lightroom and that worked very well here. The "after" is very nice but I think it wouldn't look as nice if you'd exposed more for the beach and clipped the highlights in those clouds as a result.
Missed correct exposure by a long shot on this one. Shot on G5 with Rokinon fisheye, f/22 (!!) to get a longer exposure. Work in post included fixing exposure, white balance, color correction, gradient filters, cloning out tripod leg in lower left corner, distortion correction...
My first try at shooting sunrise when I was at the Grand Canyon. I think using the RAW file with a bit of thinkering in LR5 did a pretty decent job at recovering the shoot. I did a print 4x6 and it look pretty good.
OK, to add to the bright skies/dark everything else theme and why I don't consider it bad exposure practice.
Before:
I regularly go for a very early morning walk and take the camera, and I often end up shooting interesting cloud formations which are underlit by the rising sun. In this case the sun was just below the horizon. I exposed for the brightest cloud area using the E-M1's spot highlight mode because I wanted to keep the delicacy of the wispiest clouds. The foreground was in shadow because the sun is still just below the horizon. In real life the foreground looked a lot brighter than in the file as it came from the camera, it was actually quite nice, even light, but the difference in brightness between sky and foreground was far greater than the sensor could handle.
After:
I have to say at the outset that the foreground here still appears darker than it did at the time, and so does the sky but I find myself losing highlight detail I want when I try to make things brighter in either area so this is my compromise solution.
What I did in Lightroom:
First I increased exposure to +1 which still left the foreground too dark but also started losing too much detail in the sky. To bring the detail back in the sky I reduced highlights to -23. I often reduce contrast as well with clouds but I didn't here. I raised the shadows to +38 and reduced the blacks to -25 in order to avoid the darker tones looking too washed out. The foreground was still way too dark so I used a graduated filter across a very narrow band just below the lowest part of the sky so it raised the exposure in the foreground very rapidly by a further 1.22 of a stop and also raised the shadows slightly, I added a very small amount of clarity in the basic panel (+7) but didn't push that further because it starts to look very artificial very fast in these conditions and did a very minor curves adjustment to lower the brightness of the darker parts of the sunlit clouds. Then some very gentle sharpening and noise reduction. Go pixel peeping in the shadows and you will still find some noise.
Did I get the exposure wrong? I probably could have given it a third of a stop more exposure, maybe half a stop at most, but I don't think that would have made a significant difference to the result. The brightest tones where the sun is rising are just short of clipping in both the before and after and I didn't want that area to tip over into clipping and start to wash out. I think this scene really is fairly close to the limits of what the sensor can capture in terms of dynamic range and I do think I wouldn't have got the cloud tones, which is what I wanted, if I'd given much more in the way of exposure.
Generally speaking, isn't it the case when shooting raw that you should focus on keeping the skies just right so the underexposed parts of the image can be pulled back in post processing? On that basis, it really is hard to see anything wrong with most of the raw files posted so far.
Here's another...geeze, I should just put the camera away moment because the backlighting is horrendous, that turned into a, I'm glad I pulled the camera out to capture this moment.
After:
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This was taken when all three of my dogs were alive & since the one on the left is no longer with us it was important to have this one photo of them posing so well to be recovered from the overexposed shot.
Removed som lense flare in photoshop
Adjusted the horizon in Lightroom
Adjusted the exposure in Lightroom
Added Graduated filter in Lightroom
Some exposure brushed in Lightroom
Added some clarity in Lightroom
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