Backlit shots can be the bane of a street photographer’s existence until one is comfortable adjusting the camera settings on the fly. Shooting in RAW helps, because it gives you more leeway in the highlight and shadow extremes. It took several tries for me to expose this shot in a way that would allow me to capture both the man and the scene outside the bus window. Because he stayed still I was able to quickly switch to manual mode (I generally shoot in aperture priority on bright days), adjust my settings to make sure I was well within the black and white extremes, and get the shot I wanted. Then I brought the highlights down and the shadows up in AfterShot Pro 3 to get a nicely balanced image.
Great post! Also if you don’t have time to switch to manual adjust your compensation dial. Thanks for sharing & advice.
Yes, that is also a good, quick fix. Thanks for reminding me!
I meant to ask you another question. The software you’re using? How do you like it?
AfterShot Pro 3 has some weaknesses, but overall I like it. The most recent update was December (I believe) of 2018, so Corel keeps it up to date. I like having one main screen instead of having to click through to different modules for the library and editing. And it hasn’t taken long for me to learn how to do most of what I could do in Lightroom.
This software doesn’t do as well with removing noise, however. It leaves things more pixelated unless you know how to really finesse the settings. (I’m still working on that.) It also doesn’t seem to have the features of Lr that make sharpening without over-sharpening or adjusting the vignetting easy. And I haven’t yet figured out if gradient filtering is possible. But it is a worthy replacement for Lr.