The Digital Photography Book

Keep from Destroying Part of Your Image

One of the biggest mistakes we can make with a landscape shot is letting something in it get so bright that it loses detail, which is called either “blowing out the highlights” or “clipping the highlights.” This means that an area in the image that’s too bright will have no detail, no pixels, no nuthin’. The most likely things to clip are clouds, snow-covered mountains (or just snow, in general)—really any bright areas in an image can be clipped. We can fix this in-camera (ideally, where you want to do it because if you clip an area badly, it can’t be fixed in post. Minor clipping, yes, but if it goes too ...