Blowing Highlights and Printing Them

[JB Rasor]

My inquiry today is a technical and artistic set of questions. Let me know your thoughts and practices.

I was trained to never let pure white be present when going to print. I always pull back highlights so that something is visible. Even if it is a white tone, it isn’t 255 paper white, rather, something in the range of 245 RGB. I know that a chrome car bumper might be beyond repair, and other similar circumstances.

Is this a good practice to continue when printing? I’m mostly concerned when blown highlights are part of the image…in other words they are there as an aesthetic decision, not error. I’m thinking Stanley Kubrick…”The Shining” window scenes, for example.
When printing, still a good practice to reduce the highlights down from 255?

My last question is: what if an image is only going to screen? Does dialing back highlights apply equally to screen as it does to print? My instinct tells me it does not. I’d think that without a reference luminance point, i.e. the photo paper, the eye can’t detect the difference on screen, in most circumstances.

Anyway, thanks as always guys!

JB   

P.S. A still from "The Shining." 

[Jager]

My opinion is that the "don't clip your highlights or shadows" mantra has become a thing, a religion that many digital photographers then slavishly follow by rote.  Your window image is a perfect example of where blown highlights are perfectly okay.  Both on screen and in print.

That said, a print with very large swaths of paper white is likely to begin looking odd.  But then, that gets into the larger questions of exposure in general and dynamic range.

On a mildly related note, being able to print nuance in the brightest highlights and darkest shadows was part of what attracted me to Jon Cone's Piezography, for B&W.  You can have a tone mapped to 254 and it'll get ink.

[DeanChriss]

I was trained to never let pure white be present when going to print. I always pull back highlights so that something is visible.
...

JB   

Deliberately blowing out some areas of a scene for creative effect occasionally opens up some good possibilities. That's especially true when the blown area contains no content of interest or distracting content. For instance, a subject backlit by a bright sky can be properly exposed with the sky blown to pure white for a high key effect.

[hugowolf]

The thing is, there isn't a paper out there that is even close to Lab 100,0,0. So, depending on what rendering intent you are using, RGB(254,254,254) may not put down any ink.

Brian A

[Guillermo Luijk]

Look at the classic painters. They had the freedom not to blow ANY highlights in their scenes, no matter how high they were, but still they chose in many situations a plain texture-less colour to represent them:






Why should we photographers be even more demanding than them? specially when the linear nature of a digital sensor is very prone to saturation.

I wrote some thoughts about this:

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&ie=UTF8&langpair=es%7Cen&nv=1&rurl=translate.google.com&u=http://www.guillermoluijk.com/article/oilhighlights/index.htm&usg=ALkJrhg3PbPZiFnLs7D4NFQiSlB8gTKB9g

Regards.

[elliot_n]

My approach to intentionally blown highlights depends on how I'm printing them. If I'm making digital C-types, I'll leave them at 255,255,255. For inkjets on resin-coated or baryta papers I'll pull the highlights down to about 245,245,245 to minimise gloss differential.

[digitaldog]

My opinion is that the "don't clip your highlights or shadows" mantra has become a thing, a religion that many digital photographers then slavishly follow by rote. 

How about: "don't clip your highlights or shadows where you desire to retain some tones/data?"
There are many photographers who make a conscious effort to clip shadows as an example: http://www.gormanphotography.com
Here's an example where the photographer didn't want to clip highlight data which is an 'artistic' decision, nothing more.

[Mark Lindquist]

JB, my take is that while using different papers, it becomes a sliding scale, since papers have such different values when it comes to white points.  Essentially, in that regard, it becomes an "it's all relative issue", somewhat.  In that regard, just letting the high point of the paper come through works well, often.

Another aspect about the highlights is that in many cases those areas are specular highlights and no matter what you try to do, they are unrecoverable. 

The best comment I've read so far here, is what Guillermo said about painters choosing to paint what they see, and included these "blown" areas, just the way they let the line fade where it does in real life.

At some point, it should become (in my view) an issue of looking at the print and making a decision based on aesthetics rather than numbers or convention or whatever.  Portrait artists stop looking at the subject at some point in their work and concentrate on the final image, adding their own interpretation.

As far as printing on glossy paper, and bronzing or whatever, I have a HP Z3200ps with gloss enhancer.  It takes care of all those problems...  (and if anyone believes that, I will sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, LOL).

-Mark

[Wayne Fox]

Some choose to make sure there are no "blown" whites when printing an image by forcing everything to a lower number in an effort to eliminate gloss differential.

[DeanChriss]

Some choose to make sure there are no "blown" whites when printing an image by forcing everything to a lower number in an effort to eliminate gloss differential.

Conversely it's possible to blow out a background and constructively use gloss differential to simulate a spot varnish look on the parts that are not blown. That seems to look better when the paper-white background makes up a large part of the image or surrounds the subject but it's all a matter of creative choice.