Comfort Zones & Proper Equipment – Part Two

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(Note: Part One is just below this post.)

When we left off, I discovered I didn’t have the right lenses nor the right techniques for capturing birds and critters. But that’s not the end of the story. Hence, Part Two.

As I briefly mentioned in Part One, I also quickly discovered a geared tripod head can be next to worthless for moving subjects. My usual head is an Arca-Swiss C1 Cube, which I absolutely love. Its extreme precision results from its fine-tooth gears that separately control up-and-down (pitch) and side-to-side (roll) motions.

Here’s the beauty of a geared head. Let’s say something’s perfectly aligned from edge to edge in the viewfinder, but is a tad low. Rotating the proper knob will raise the front of the lens without affecting the side to side tilt at all.

Sunrise at Anhinga Trail

By contrast, loosening the tension on a ball head allows it to move freely in any direction, and may reposition the camera in a way you don’t want. To add insult to injury, many ball heads shift by even the tiniest amount when they are locked back down. You finally get the image perfectly aligned in the viewfinder, but then it moves when you lock the ball head down. Frustrating.

What makes the geared head so perfect for stationary subjects makes it completely worthless for moving subjects (glaciers excluded). By the time you crank the adjustment knobs to capture that bird taking off, it has migrated to another state. But you can precisely frame where it was!

By the way, resting at home was my Really Right Stuff BH-55 ball head, which would have been perfect for birds and critters. Next time.

Fortunately, I had recently bought another Arca-Swiss geared head—the new d4. And more good fortune: I had it with me. Unlike the Cube, the d4 has two tensioning knobs that could be loosened enough that the gears were essentially free-wheeling. With the base rotation knob and both tensioning knobs loosened, the head could be used when tracking moving subjects while still giving some support. Hallelujah. But unlike with a gimbal head, just don’t let go of the camera!

Alligator Sunning on Bank

For landscape and travel photography, I always use a remote shutter release cable. This appendage actually got in the way when trying to track moving creatures. It was much easier to use the camera’s shutter button while moving the camera around following the motion of the birds, alligators, and crocodiles.

I was also the only one I saw that week using a focusing cloth. I can see why bird and critter photographers don’t use one. It’s hard to see what’s going on outside of the viewfinder. This isn’t a problem with landscape photography, but can be a detriment when trying to keep track of a bunch of moving subjects. Also, I don’t imagine birds are comfortable with a big white blob looking at them with one big eye. It’s kind of the reverse of camouflage. Hey, maybe if I had a camo cloth….

Black Vulture

Besides the camera body, two standard pieces of gear worked just as well for landscape or for bird photography. Those were my Gitzo GT1341XLS tripod and my Think Tank modular belt system. (More about the latter in a future post.)

So at a minimum, there are camera, lens, flash, remote cable, focusing cloth, and tripod head considerations if you are planning a trip to shoot both landscape and birds or wildlife. What’s a photographer to do?

One of the participants in the NANPA Regional Event solved part of this by renting a 300mm f/2.8 lens and a 2x teleconverter, along with a Wimberly gimbal head. Renting is a great way to learn about gear first-hand. Can you capture the shots you want? Are the images sharp and contrasty? Is it easy to use in the field? Can you realistically travel with it, and carry it in the field? Do you think you would use it enough to buy it?

(By the way, at the end of the Event, she told me she was going to buy everything she rented.)

If you’re pretty sure you’ll use a certain expensive piece of gear enough to own it, but don’t want to spend the money, don’t hesitate to buy a used one—especially a recently discontinued version. There are many camera owners (as opposed to you real photographers) who insist on owning the latest and greatest, despite hardly even having taken a picture with their previous equipment. This hold true for lenses, camera bodies, tripods, and about anything else. Try your local camera store or a on-line source like KEH (www.keh.com). KEH has a 30-day return policy in case it doesn’t work or isn’t in the condition as described.

Despite still being nature photography, the equipment and skill sets required to shoot birds and wildlife are surprisingly different than for landscapes. You might expect that wedding, photojournalist, sports, studio, or commercial photographers would need different equipment than nature photographers do. But depending on your intended subject, even nature photographers need to think carefully about what they will need for their intended subjects.

Fortunately, birds and critters were relatively close in the Everglades, especially along Anhinga Trail. So my paucity of long glass was not the handicap it could have been. Sure, there were plenty of times I wished I had longer lenses, but it is possible to successfully capture birds, alligators, and crocodiles in the Everglades with shorter, slower glass. Most nature and landscape photographers probably already own much of the rest of the gear needed to capture birds, wildlife, and landscape images. The secrets are in applying the proper techniques for the equipment you have.

Great Blue Heron (with cropped legs)

Next time I go to the Everglades, and I can hardly wait to go back, I will rent a Nikon 200-400mm f/4 lens, and bring my RRS BH-55 ball head. I’ve also ordered a 2x teleconverter to go with it. Those birds won’t stand a chance.

Comfort Zones & Proper Equipment – Part One

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Thanks to Bill Lea, in February I visited Everglades National Park for the first time as one of the co-leaders of the NANPA Regional Event there. This is the first of two posts about what I learned during that trip.

Before I saw Bill’s photographs for his forthcoming book, I hadn’t thought too seriously about shooting in the Everglades, despite how relatively close the Park is to Atlanta. It seemed like a flat, grassy, swampy area, where the big attractions are birds and critters. I don’t typically shoot birds and critters, nor flat, grassy, swampy areas. It didn’t sound like much of a destination for a landscape and travel photographer. Boy, was I ever wrong.

Fortunately, for several days before the Event, Bill gave us an extensive (and photographically rewarding) tour of the Park, based on his five years of photographing there. I would never have figured out nor enjoyed the Everglades as quickly without Bill’s expert guidance. I found birds and critters fun and challenging to shoot (especially with my equipment), and found the landscape remarkably variable and beautifully photogenic. Now I can’t wait to go back.

As an aside, living with Atlanta traffic, I misunderstood the concept of traveling to a park to shoot birds. During any given rush hour here, you could see so many birds shot within such a short time that it gets old pretty quick. But I get it now.

Believe it or not, just like in many other parks, there are signs denoting elevations in the Everglades. Unlike my experiences in some of the Western parks, however, it wasn’t any harder to breathe even at the highest elevations. I felt pretty much the same at the Elevation 4 Feet sign as I had earlier at the Elevation 3 Feet sign. Guess I’ve stayed in pretty good shape.

My first morning in the Park started with a sunrise shoot over Florida Bay at Flamingo. So far so good. I’m in my comfort zone with my lenses, geared tripod head, focusing cloth, remote release, and the rest of my usual landscape kit.

Sunrise at Flamingo

Sun’s fully up now, so landscape photography is done. It’s off to nearby Eco Pond to shoot birds. Hey, these bloody things move! What’s up with that? And they’re relatively small. And relatively far away. And just as soon as I compose my shot, it’s either changed or gone. There goes my comfort zone.

Good thing I brought my trusty old Nikon 300mm f/4 lens and my 1.7x teleconverter, I thought. On a full frame camera, that’s a reach of 510mm. Temporary euphoria. But very quickly, I discovered you need more than just focal length.

Take a glacially slow f/4 autofocus lens, slow it down more by adding a teleconverter, and you’ll soon discover that glaciers are the only moving things you can successfully track using dynamic autofocus with this setup. Many times, autofocus just wouldn’t work at all. I soon ended up back with manual focus in my attempts to track birds, whether flying or just moving around. This actually worked okay. Sometimes. Well, a few times.

While it’s completely obvious and expected, or at least it should have been, the depth of field at 510mm on a full frame camera is quite small. Two birds across the pond would rarely both be in focus if one was even slightly in front of the other. Even stopping down didn’t help much. Of course, stopping down requires much slower shutter speeds (but the subjects move) or much higher ISO (which increases noise). But even if you can get the shutter speed and ISO settings to work, you don’t want the backgrounds to be in focus, so you don’t want to stop down too much. It’s an interesting series of compromises. You really start looking for birds lining up in the same plane, which they apparently don’t like doing.

Roseate Spoonbill & Friend

After only a half day (I’m a fast learner), I realized why I was the only one on the shore without a faster long lens. Good thing it was hidden under my focusing cloth most of the time.

Here’s a good place to mention another landscape shooter’s custom that doesn’t work at all with birds and critters. I always use mirror lock-up. In that mode, when you click the shutter the first time, the mirror raises and locks out of the way of the shutter. After a pause, you click the shutter again to actually make the picture. With birds or critters, of course, that guarantees they will be out of your frame before an image is captured. It only took me one attempt before changing that setting.

Good news interlude: I did capture an image of a swimming crocodile. But just one, as I spent too much time fussing with my geared tripod head. More on that later.

Crocodile Swimming

Okay, there are certain camera settings and lens criteria to pay attention to. But the rest of your camera kit can be pretty much the same. Or not.

Although I use fill flash in my work for all of my accident vehicle photographs, I don’t even carry  a flash with me when I travel for my personal photography, whether the intended subjects are travel or landscape. For birds and wildlife, many experienced photographers use a flash with an extender like a Better Beamer to counter dark shadows and to add a catch light in their subject’s eye. Perhaps needless to say, I didn’t have my flash with me for this trip. Fortunately, conditions were bright enough that the flash didn’t seem necessary.

Okay, so I didn’t have the right lens and didn’t have my flash. Unfortunately, my equipment story doesn’t end here, even though this post does. In Part Two, I will talk of tripod heads, focusing cloths, and remote releases.

Best Smokies Workshops

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Since 2005, I have had the honor of co-teaching two photo workshops per year through the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, or GSMIT. For the Spring workshop, I am one of four instructors, led by great friend and legendary Smokies photographer Bill Lea. (Bill is soon to be a legendary Everglades photographer, but that’s a subject for another post this weekend.)

Bill Lea’s newly revamped website is www.billlea.com. Our other instructors (and longtime friends) are wildlife and computer wizard Todd Moore (website coming soon) and professional photographer and master printer Jeff Miller (www.mountainlens.com).

Trillium and Falls

The workshop is a fun, action-packed four days of talks, shooting, post-processing, and critiques. It all starts with a presentation about the Fundamentals of Photography in the Field by yours truly at 3:00 pm on Friday, April 20, 2012. It ends Monday, April 23, 2012, at 12:30 pm after a couple presentations by me on post-processing and on the challenges of landscape photography. (Don’t worry; I’m pretty quiet in between those. Well, not officially talking, at least!)

Bill will be presenting programs on Light (Friday night), Close-up Photography (Saturday afternoon), and Wildlife Photography (Sunday morning). Wow, sounds like a lot of presentations. It is, but wait, there’s more! Lots more.

During the workshop, we spend even more time out shooting in the field than we do inside for presentations. We are out before sunrise on Saturday and Sunday, with breakfast in the field. (How’s that for service!?!) We’re also out in the afternoon and evening until after the sun goes down both Saturday and Sunday, again with our meals in the field.

Spring Greens at Foothills

In the time between shooting sessions and talks (I told you it was action-packed), we help with your downloading and post-processing needs. We’ll help you select three images to submit for the critique Sunday afternoon before our final organized field session. For many participants, this group critique is the highlight of the weekend. Afterward, we go right back into the field to apply what we’ve covered in the critiques.

Before the presentations Monday morning, there are several choices for sunrise field trips. This gives you yet another chance to capture sunrise at a location of your choice. By the time the light is too harsh for good photography later in the morning, it will be time for the last two talks and discussions.

Spring Green Tree, Cades, Cove

We usually have quite a few returning participants every time. And that’s not because they flunked and had to retake the course! It’s because it is so much fun, and they can see improvements in their photography each time.

For more information, or to register, please check out: http://www.gsmit.org/springphoto.html

Please feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions or would like more information. I hope to see you there!

Contrast and Saturation Basics

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When you first open a properly exposed Raw image, it usually looks flat and lacks punch. It’s nothing at all like you saw when you clicked the shutter. That image now requires processing in Photoshop’s Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), Lightroom, or the Raw converter of your choice. You can, and should, adjust the exposure, set the global white balance, capture sharpen, handle noise, etc., in ACR or its equivalent, but a discussion of Raw processing will be for future posts. For now, in general, just make sure you leave some room at the dark and light ends of the histogram, if possible, and leave the image a little flat to open in Photoshop. It’s always easier to add than to remove contrast and saturation in your final Master image.

So, what is the difference between contrast and saturation, and how do you add one, the other, or both?

Contrast is the difference between light and dark tones. You can also think of it as the separation between the shadows and highlights. An image with low contrast is said to look flat or dull, while high contrast makes an image look punchy or “contrasty”.

Saturation is the depth or intensity of the color. The lower the saturation, the less intense are the colors. They can look weak and pale. If you fully “desaturate” the colors, you end up with a monochrome, or black & white, image. On the other hand, if you increase saturation too high, the colors can become “oversaturated” and look unnatural.

To illustrate the effects, let’s use an example from Antelope Canyon. As you may know, Antelope Canyon was created by erosion of the Navajo Sandstone. As sunlight streams in from the top, it both reflects and directly illuminates the intricate walls and surfaces in the narrow canyon. With your camera’s white balance set on Auto, the prevalent orange hue becomes sort of a grayish orange in the Raw image.

We’ll start with the unprocessed Raw image, shown below. As you can see, it’s rather flat and dull.

To add contrast and saturation, let’s add the following Curves adjustment layer:

By way of quick review, a default Curve is a straight diagonal line, from 0,0 at lower left to 255,255 at upper right. You can see this default line in the background of the Curves panel shown. If you increase the slope of the curve—in other words, make it steeper or more vertical—in Normal blend mode, you increase both contrast and saturation. That’s what was done above. Note: To make sure it would show up on your screen, I’ve made a much more severe adjustment in this Curve than I ever would in a single Curve in an actual image.

(If you aren’t clear on Curves, Blend modes, Layers, or other Photoshop functions, check out Charlie Cramer’s book in the Best Photoshop book post in Resources. If you don’t know what those functions even are, you might want to start by watching videos at Kelby Training, Adobe TV, Lynda.com, and the like. Then try those functions out yourself! They’ll soon be second nature.)

So here’s what the image looks like with that Curve applied:

It now has more separation between the darker and lighter tones than the original, and the orange colors are more intense.

But what if you want only the contrast, but no additional saturation? Then you simply change the Blending mode of that Curves layer from Normal to Luminosity. Now, the Curve has only increased the separation between the darkest and lightest tones, but has not affected the depth or intensity of the color, like this:

The image has kept the better separation of tones, but has kept the original orange color.

If you want a more intense color, but without an increase in contrast, add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. Then slide the Saturation slider to the right. Here’s what the original image looks like with no Curve, but with the Saturation slider dragged to +40:

Now, the image has much more intense orange color, but has lost the crispness of the increased contrast, especially in the shadows.

Of course, none of these images are finished products. They have all been overdone to demonstrate the effects of adjusting saturation and contrast. Once you understand what they are, how they affect your image, and how to adjust them, you can decide how much contrast and saturation works best for each image.

As I’m sure you’ve surmised, there is a lot more to fully understanding contrast and saturation than could be posted in this introduction. My hope is that these posts will give you a better understanding of a topic, and spur you to experiment with it on your own.

Oh, Say, Can You See?

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At a workshop in Redwood National and State Parks back in 2003, Jack Dykinga gave me one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received for getting better images in the field. It was simple, had been around just about as long as photography itself, yet was rarely used by anyone but large format shooters. I adopted it back then for use with my DSLR, and have been using it ever since. For me, it has become as essential as my tripod and cable release.

It helps me compose and focus, both physically and mentally. With it, I can easily see anything on my LCD, regardless of the ambient light. It helps keep wind, sprinkles, and even flying bugs out of my eyes while I’m shooting, helping me concentrate on my subject. With it, it’s much easier for me to check the corners and edges of my frame, and to look for merges throughout the image. It even allows me to use the Depth of Field preview function, regardless of how dark the image becomes when I push the button!

It’s become so important to me, that I bring a spare when I travel in case something happens to the first one in the field. And as a final bonus, many of my shooting buddies have encouraged me to use it—even when I’m not shooting—as a fantastic fashion accessory.

What in the world could this miracle item be? It’s a dark cloth, or focusing cloth. Mine is a 36″x48″ Toyo-View focusing cloth that I got from B&H. It’s black on the inside, to give you a dark area to shoot from, and white on the outside to reflect heat. There are strips of Velcro on both sides of one end that cinch the cloth around your lens, making it fast and easy to attach and remove when changing lenses in the field.

Focusing Cloth in the Field

After wrapping one end around your lens, the rest of the cloth simply drapes over your camera, your head and shoulders, and partially down your back. This eliminates most of the stray light around you, allowing you to see much better through your viewfinder. You can’t believe how much easier it is to concentrate on your composition and focusing when surrounded by relative darkness. It also allows you to see everything on your LCD, even in the brightest sunlight.

As you can see from the photograph below, it can also help you blend in with any ghosts you may encounter when out shooting.

Focusing Cloth and Ghost

Now, do you have to spend US$45 on a commercially available dark cloth with Velcro. Of course you do! Not really. A US$5 black bath towel from a discount store works just fine. You can drape the towel over your lens, camera, and head, as my friend Sue is doing during a workshop in the Smokies. (Her towel is dark blue, but is still effective. In general, though, you want a black towel, so you don’t have any visual color contamination while you’re shooting under it.)

Sue with Dark Towel

Like any other tool in photography, using a dark cloth takes a little getting used to. Think back to when you first used a tripod, remote release, or any filters. But almost right away, you’ll likely find the benefits so outweigh any learning curve that you’ll adopt it full time. I did.

NANPA Everglades Regional Event

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I am honored to have been asked to join four other professional nature photographers (including my friend Bill Lea—who’s writing a book about the Everglades) for a NANPA (North American Nature Photography Association) photo adventure featuring five field trips in Everglades National Park. There will be both morning and evening shoots on Friday and Saturday, and a morning shoot on Sunday, all during the prime light hours. Critiques and Q&A sessions with the pros will be held midday at the hotel. The event will end with a farewell brunch on Sunday. It should be a fun, action-packed long weekend of shooting and image critiques.

Dates: Thursday, Feb. 23 through Sunday, Feb. 26, 2012

Cost: Members $345/Non-Members $445 (see registration form for other options)

Location: Florida Everglades, Florida City, FL

Last Date to Register: Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2012

Maximum Number of Attendees: 60

For schedule and to register, please check out www.nanpa.org/2012everglades

Why I Use Manual Exposure Mode

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Choice of exposure mode always seems to generate a spirited discussion among photographers. Here’s my 2¢ about it. Actually, it’s a long post (probably more like 4 or 5¢), so you might want to grab your favorite beverage before settling down in the warm glow of your monitor.

If you’re serious about your photography, you’ll need to use Program, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, or Manual exposure mode. Neither a fully Automatic mode nor any of the “Scene” modes found on many DSLRs allows you to override what the camera chooses for you.

A camera’s meter is designed to determine the exposure that renders the scene as a mid-tone. But the actual scene may require a darker or lighter exposure than that.

As with any other element of your photography, the correct exposure for a particular image is the one that shows the scene as you intended. This might be, and often is, different from what the camera meter indicates.

Shutter Priority, Aperture Priority, and Program are known as automatic modes because the camera automatically sets the aperture, shutter speed, or both, respectively, based on the camera’s meter reading. In Manual mode, you set both the aperture and shutter speed, using the camera’s meter as a starting point.

You can successfully use any of these modes (why else would they be there?), but it’s worth finding one or more you are most comfortable with. I exclusively use Manual mode. I find it the easiest and most consistent for the kinds of photography I do. But I hope this discussion helps you choose the one that works best for you.

Fredo in Office

By the way, this image has nothing to do with this article. But a picture of my best furry friend Fredo sure makes this a much more attractive post, doesn’t it? Continue reading →

It’s Okay to Crop – Sometimes

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I can hear several of my friends laughing even before reading the rest of this. After years of my staunch (they might say unreasonably stubborn) aversion to cropping, they’ve prodded me to realize that the camera’s default image shape doesn’t always result in the best image.

It’s still my preference to get everything just the way I want it in the camera, especially with landscape images. But now, I’ve come to appreciate the benefits of the occasional crop.

Sometimes, you have to crop to fit certain requirements for a website, client, contest, or publication. (Heck, even my header image on this site is cropped from a full frame.) Other times, a judicious crop just suits the image better than the camera’s default shape does.

Now this is not a license to “shoot loose, and crop later”! That’s lazy, sloppy, reduces the resolution of your images, and is bad practice.

Here’s an example of when cropping worked better than the default image shape. When she was a little puppy, my BFFFF (Best Furry Friend Forever, Fredo) came by my office for a visit. Well she didn’t come by on her own; her Mom brought her over.

Fredo Singing (full frame). Click on image to enlarge.

She was sitting in one of the conference room chairs while I was taking pictures of her. She was being so tolerant, it was time to reward her with another treat. I loved the expression on her face in this picture as she anticipated the treat. It looked like she was singing.

But as a rectangle, the photograph was cluttered and distracting. I knew a square crop would eliminate the distractions, focus the attention on Fredo, and makes it look more like she’s singing. I framed the image so there would be enough room around her so I could crop it square, yet still retain a sense of place by including recognizable portions of the chair and table. I also placed her to the left side in case the rectangular shape worked as well. It didn’t.

Fredo Singing (square crop). Click on image to enlarge.

One of my main influences for thinking in terms of the square image is my friend and mentor Charlie Waite. For most of his professional career, he made landscape images using a Hasselblad film camera, which yielded a square image. A square format image often tells a significantly different story than a rectangular one.

What I’ve learned is that cropping an image to improve its composition doesn’t necessarily mean the image was not composed well when the shutter was clicked. Sometimes, it’s just what you need to tell your story in the best way.

Maybe it’s just that a puppy taught an old dog new tricks.

 

Far From Home?

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As you know, it is essential to travel long distances, preferably to exotic locations, if you want to make interesting images.

Wait, maybe that isn’t really so.

No matter where you live, there are incredible shooting opportunities all around you. Continual shooting is one of the best ways for you to develop your photographic eye. (Reading photography resources and studying photographs and paintings by masters are two other important aides.)

Roswell Road Bridge. Click on image to enlarge.

This image was made less than two miles from my house. I had driven over this bridge thousands of times before without ever noticing anything special about it.

One day, a friend and I decided to go out shooting, so we grabbed our cameras and tripods, and walked along a paved trail along the river. The path led under this all-too-familiar bridge. It was late afternoon, and the sun was starting to go down to the right in the image.

Our intention was to go past the bridge to another spot along the river edge. We never made it. We spent the next hour or so shooting various compositions, including horizontal (landscape) and vertical (portrait) orientations.

Then I turned around, and saw a totally different view. Sun was pouring through the drainage slot on the bridge, and illuminating a pile of rocks below. When I saw that light beam, I knew I was going to process it as a black & white image later.

Roswell Bridge B&W. Click on image to enlarge.

So in an hour, two miles from my house, under a bridge I had crossed thousands of times, I made two images that I liked. Funny thing is when I show them to people, and ask them to guess where there were made, I usually get somewhere in Spain or France as the reply. Of course, I always tell them they guessed right!

Not really. To me, the real story is even more surprising.

As examples of local things to shoot, my Five Mile Radius gallery has a number of images I’ve made within a five mile radius (as you might have guessed) of my house. I hope those images encourage you to get out with your camera and tripod, and explore where you live. Sort of like a traveling photographer who thinks your location is an exotic trip might do…

Bigger is Better

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When converting a RAW image file (and you are shooting RAW, right?), you have a choice of color spaces and bit depths to work in. Unless you’re not going to do any post-processing, and are only making a JPEG, you should work in 16-bit. (Hmmmmm, this might be the subject of a future post. For now, just trust me.)

Just as strong a recommendation can be made for using the ProPhoto color space. When converting a RAW image, the most common color spaces used, from smallest to largest, are sRGB, Adobe RGB 1998, and ProPhoto. If you shoot RAW, your image doesn’t have a color space assigned until you process it in your RAW converter of choice. (Yes, even if you set your camera’s color space to sRGB or Adobe RGB 1998, that only applies to JPEGs. The RAW images won’t have any color space embedded.)

There are plenty of good technical explanations available on the web and in books to prove why this is so. But to save 3,000 words, here are three screen shots from Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) that should show the benefits of working in the largest space.

The first screen shot shows an image made at sunset, with an intense orange sky. When sRGB color space (the smallest) was chosen, a large area of bright red highlight warning dominates the image. (That bright red is the highlight warning in ACR; it’s not in the image itself.)

sRGB Color Space (8-bit). (Click on image to enlarge, then click again to scroll through all three.)

When Adobe RGB 1998 color space was chosen, the area with the highlight warning was greatly reduced. This is because it is a much larger color space than sRGB. (Bit depth and color space are independent, so either 8-bit or16-bit bit depths can be used with Adobe RGB 1998 without any effect on the colors.)

Adobe RGB 1998 (8-bit). (Click on image to enlarge, then click again to scroll through all three.)

By converting the image to the largest color space, ProPhoto, there were no pixels in the highlight warning zone, so the red warning disappeared. (ProPhoto images should be in 16-bit.)

ProPhoto Color Space (16-bit). (Click on image to enlarge, then click again to scroll through all three.)

Converting your RAW images to ProPhoto and 16-bit will give you the most data possible to work with in Photoshop.

(Just remember: When you’ve finished all your adjustments and saved your Master File, you’ll have to flatten the image, convert to sRGB, and change the image mode to 8-bits if you intend to make a JPEG. More on that to come….)

So once again, bigger is better. As far as bit depth and color space go, that is.