I mentioned a few days ago that some pictures that were almost not recognizably pictures were salvageable in the digital darkroom. In going through some recent pictures, I found two especially entertaining examples.
The first picture is one that I took at ASA 100 with Big Bertha, 1/1000th of a second. It came out completely black. There's no data there, right? (Fortunately an apparently black image isn't terribly large.)
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So I loaded this apparently completely dead image into HP Photosmart, and hit the "Auto Adjust" button. I have no idea what this does, exactly, but about half the time, it perfectly balances contrast and image brightness--and perhaps another 1/4 of the time it gets me close enough to fiddle with the other controls.
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Hard as it may be to believe, all that information was present in the "black" picture. Just because it doesn't look like much on the camera's screen, doesn't mean that there's nothing there!
There are limits to what you can do with this, of course. Here's another example that was completely white (1/6th of a second, ASA 100, again through Big Bertha). There was enough motion during that time, and enough light still in the sky, to make it a complete washout, no matter what I did to it.
As it came out of the camera:
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Best effort digital darkroom:
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