How to exposed high contrast outdoor daylight scenes on film

silvan schnelli · August 23, 2025

What would be the best method for outdoor high contrast shooting on film. I recently received my 16mm scans back and some scenes were very high contrast, with very bright and halated highlights overpowering the scene, but the faces being relatively dark. Often also the sky is white with no more detail.

It was a run and gun shooting just of my family with an aaton, so I didn’t really pay attention to contrast ratios and just exposed for the faces.

I roughly always overexposed 1 stop and push processed half a stop. I am wondering if this push process adversely affected the image leading to more intense highlights.

Why do peoples push process film when already overexposing or obtaining good exposure. Is it for increased grain? contrast? color alterations produced by the pushing ? And do people usually compensate for this pushing in the printing or post production?

In general when people talk about overexposing film, is the overexposure often corrected in post or in this overexposure often considered the “correct exposure” for the project?

I hope this all makes sense. Attached below is a high contrast scene with faces and two stills from similar scenario. In one of them I obtained good exposure and in the second I opened up the iris one more stop and it lead to insanely halated highlights. How would I predict this and overcome this when filming.

(the bad compression is ruining the image a bit, but I think it’s good enough to show my point)

fine highlights

Overly bright and halated highlights

silvan schnelli · August 23, 2025

The first image I was talking about, one of the more drastic examples

Edited August 23, 2025 by silvan schnelli

Tyler Purcell · August 23, 2025

Yea I mean contrast is going to be a problem in situations like this.

50D has around 11 stops of latitude in the highlights, but only 3 stops or so in the blacks. So in situations where you have a high contrast ratio like these, you need to over expose a tiny bit (like you were) and bring those highlights back in post. I create highlight masks in my material to suck those highlights back into detail range. I bet the scan has plenty of data, but because it's an SDR scan in an SDR workflow, you just seeing the detail as much. This scan looks similar to the problems we face with our SDR scanner all the time. I will generally do a bit of work for clients to clean this up and get some detail out of those highlights before delivering. But yes, you will have to work the image in post to fix it.

I would never push process daylight material, especially less than one stop? It just adds contrast, that's really all it does. You don't want more contrast, you want less contrast.

I deal with these issues on my own films constantly, I never push/pull my film. The mountain in the background was over-exposed on the original film scan, we exposed for the train because that was the most important detail and it was heavily in shadow. So in this case, the mountain was probably F22, but the train was F4 with 250D. This is a huge contrast ratio, but we had no problem bringing it back in post. Even though this was ripped from a web version so it's missing some color, it does give an example of how much you can bring back and still retain detail IF your scan is good enough.

silvan schnelli · August 24, 2025

@Tyler Purcell thank you that was along the lines of what I was thinking, so I’m glad you mention that it’s just a given issue. That was also why I was careful to never say clipping/oversaturated as there was still detail in post. I don’t enjoy grading my own footage though, although I do look management in my own time, but I was thinking a good colorist could probably balance this well.

Do you tend to spot meter the highlight and shadow regions to see the contrast ratios you are dealing with ? Do you ever underexpose the key subject because you want to preserve the highlights and then go push it in post? I’m not sure how much that makes sense in film, but I can imagine in digital where you either get the information or not, to underexpose to keep the highlights and then push it in post or with the EI.

Tyler Purcell · September 4, 2025

On 8/23/2025 at 8:40 PM, silvan schnelli said:

@Tyler Purcell thank you that was along the lines of what I was thinking, so I’m glad you mention that it’s just a given issue. That was also why I was careful to never say clipping/oversaturated as there was still detail in post. I don’t enjoy grading my own footage though, although I do look management in my own time, but I was thinking a good colorist could probably balance this well.

It depends on what you're after look wise honestly. It shouldn't be too tricky to grade film shots on your own.

On 8/23/2025 at 8:40 PM, silvan schnelli said:

Do you tend to spot meter the highlight and shadow regions to see the contrast ratios you are dealing with ? Do you ever underexpose the key subject because you want to preserve the highlights and then go push it in post? I’m not sure how much that makes sense in film, but I can imagine in digital where you either get the information or not, to underexpose to keep the highlights and then push it in post or with the EI.

Because film has so much highlight retention, for documentary stuff where I'm shooting fast and using the internal meter, I try to expose for the mid tones, not the shadows or highlights. I'll zoom in to an area which has a good balance, set exposure and then zoom out. It works 9 times out of 10, unless of course something happens. Few times, the clouds blocked the sun mid shot, so I had to do a composite mask to bring up some of the dark areas.

With digital I will underexpose a tiny bit if there are any direct sunlight/highlights that may be an issue in post. Film has so much more latitude than digital in the highlights, that it's way better to just allow the highlights to be a bit over in order to save the mid-tones and blacks. With digital, you can generally bring them back, but with film, it's a no-go.