Trouble with Dark Objects against Snow
 

I'm attaching four pictures that all have similar problems of the dark objects having not bad detail but the light backgrounds being very badly washed out. I'm sure that there is a right way to take shots of this kind whether against snow and sky as these are or against some other light background. Should I have adjusted the White Balance? Suggestions, please!

Dan There doesn't seem to be much hope of getting any detail back on No 1,2 and 3, did you do them in raw or just JPG. For this type of shot I probably would have done more than one photo and underexposed about 1/2 stop or more. The last one is not bad.

Dan on the last one I was able to hold back the snow and brighten the horses with the Shadow and highlight tool in CS. There would probably be more detail in a raw image.

Shadow 65
Tonal 35
Radius 30

Highlight 14
Tonal 7
Radius 27

Hi Dan. Shooting in RAW will help in such difficult lighting. I posted a photo of swans that I shot in RAW. There would have been hardly any highlight detail in JPEG, but I was able to recover a remarkable amount of detail in RAW.
p.s I think your four photos are very good - I'd have been pleased to take them.

Snow scenes can often cause problems with metering and blue colour casts (the latter can be attractive in some scenes).

The under exposure of the subject in these shots isn't too bad and very recoverable in photoshop shadows and highlights, where you can brighten dark areas and tone down whites in one go... you can select an area and feather the selection, then apply shadows and highlights

Again with the blue colour cast, just select the area and use the saturation control to turn down the blue/cyan.

Thanks, Mike but I think that I'm loosing all the detail in thesnow, or perhaps texture would be a better term than detail. These were shot in RAW but I unfortunately lost the RAw files. I do however still have the PSD versions. I did a Batch convert in DPP, thinking tha the RAW files would be automatically retained but they were deleted and I was left with only jpegs. I might try to recover the origianls from the memory card. I believe that here are utilities that can do that.

Dan

When you next take a shots like these, why don't you meter for the snow (highlights) recompose on the horse and add a little fill light with the flash.

That's sounds good. I'll try that at the next opportunity, maybe even today.

Dan, since starting to use RAW+DPP I download into a folder called abcd.CR2 and save edited files to abcd.jpg. I don't see how you can lose the originals unless you are taking an option somewhere to do so that I have not seen. When you leave a folder it does give you options save 'all', don't save etc.; if you take the save & all, the .CR2 s include both the original and all edit instructions, just use reset buttons to return to original to start a different edit.

You can also still improve the .jpg a lot in the RGB pane, but more risk of introducing new colour casts. The (top) brightness slider in the RAW pane adjusts under/over exposure using the surplus material captured by the camera, whereas in the RGB pane it is by 'combing out' selected pixels as shown graphically in the 'levels' histogram. The shadows/highlight short cut in PSE or CS automates the 'levels' alterations. The Levels process can also be done taking R,G,B individually (to keep that rather lovely red-brown fringe on the black horse.)

The way the professional would do it would be to bracket the shot then select the best foregound/subject and the best background. These two images would then be used to paint the background onto the foreground picture.
One drawback with this subject would be the horses movement.
Never tried it but keep threatening to.