An old thread, but I’ll contribute in any case as I feel I’ve found a good way to considerably improve picture quality in challenging lighting conditions like on sunny days, overcast days, shooting against sun or with snow on the ground.
I shoot mainly with Garmin Virb XE and it’s always slightly underexposing, even in easy conditions and more so in typical challenging settings (e.g. bright sky in the middle of the picture area).
After transferring pictures to computer and running remove_duplicates and interpolate_direction python scripts I run the pictures through Lightroom with following settings:
- exposure +0.33 (often times could be more but with this I never get blown-out highlights)
- shadows +66 (this makes a big difference and hasn’t caused any banding yet at least with the last 30k+ pictures)
- clarity +10 (to improve the tonal contrast or to make images “pop” a bit more, very conservative amount)
- vibrance +30 (to improve the dull-ish colors of Virb XE without making the images look disneychrome either)
- crop from 4:3 to 16:9 to get rid of the futile bottom area in order to reduce Lightroom export time, file size and upload time. I’ve been a bit apprehensive if this is an OK thing to do?
Finally upload_with_authentication.
I’m attaching a few before and after pictures. Any thoughts or recommendations?
-Eero
