Panasonic Lumix G6 - Dynamic Range

This is a quick real world example of the dynamic range capability of the Panasonic G6.  Highlight dynamic range is of most interest to me here as highlights are more difficult to recover than shadows.

If you're not yet familiar with dynamic range and it's affect on your final image, please refer to my blog post entitled, What the hell is good image quality?

The street scene shown below was shot in JPEG and Raw simultaneously at ISO 160, which is the base ISO and the one that captures the full dynamic range of the camera.  It was an overcast grey day in London.

As you can see in the JPEG image below, the exposure is weighted to the foreground and the background is over-exposed.

Click on image for larger view.

JPEG Image

Now let's look at the Raw image that has been processed using ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) and converted to JPEG.

Raw image converted to JPEG

If you open the images in separate tabs you can toggle between the two and compare.

Using the highlights slider in ACR, I was able to recover the blown highlights and reveal the detail that was missing and not recoverable in the out of camera JPEG.  The amount of correction to the highlights is the equivalent of under-exposing the image by -1.5EV (-1.5 stops).  Of course, if I were to under-expose the scene by -1.5EV this would block up the shadows and more shadow correction would be required.

I did lift the shadows using the shadow slider to further balance the exposure.  Because not much correction was required for the shadows no digital noise has been generated.

Depending on your exposure, I would say that on average there's at least 1 extra stop of usable dynamic range at ISO 160 to be had from the Panasonic G6 Raw files using ACR.  Your mileage may differ if using another raw converter. This is a good result and can compensate for exposure errors.