From the course: Black-and-White Darkroom: Printing Techniques

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Extending development time to get a highlight boost

Extending development time to get a highlight boost

From the course: Black-and-White Darkroom: Printing Techniques

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Extending development time to get a highlight boost

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- The last editing technique I'd like to share with you is extended development. You use it to subtly increase the density in the highlight values. In other words, when I say increase the density, what we want to do is just add a little bit more tone in the brightest of highlights. Comparable technique would be in your levels adjustment, grabbing the top slider and moving it over or maybe five points just to bring that tiniest bit of detail into the highlights. If you're working with a RAW file, think of this as a way to do maybe some highlight recovery if your negative is a little overexposed. You can see the image we picked. Once again, we're back at the Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park. These bromide deposits are blindingly white. Capturing them was a real challenge. We had to do some exposure adjustment. Typically, when you're trying to capture highlight values like this, you want to overexpose to build up density on the negatives. In doing our overexposure, I…

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