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#1
Feature Requests / Custom Advanced Bracketing
March 24, 2018, 07:55:01 PM
Hi developers,

[Jump to Request if you don't want to read the Intro]

Intro:

Although I studied some programming that was almost thirty years ago and all the knowledge is buried deep in my memory, so deeply that now, even if I wanted to, I could not program myself what I am going to ask of you. I can be a good tester though; I use ML every single day in interior photography shooting hundreds of photos every day.

Here's the thing. Dual ISO is the best feature of ML in the field of photography in which I work. Measuring for high lights and setting the power of my external flashes according to the volume of the room and the reflectance index of the walls and ceiling gives me a very good exposure base of the interior and the exterior to get all the DR I need. But there are some situations where flash is not an option. Main one is white balance. If the color temperature and brightness of the outside or the inside light is too extreme and there's no time to color balance the external flashes, using them is going to give weird color cast which will be difficult or time consuming to remove in postpo.

That's the moment when I use bracketing. But as you know, equally EV apart shots in a bracketing is not the perfect way to get the perfect bracketing. For simple scenes you can expose for HL and use + ++ in Advanced Bracketing or expose for midtones or shadows and use - --, depending on what you're trying to achieve. But for complex scenes, let's say bright exteriors with dark furniture on a mahogany wood floor and ochre walls lit with orange incandescent bulbs of different power, you get the perfect bracketing exposing specifically for each luminance zone where you want to preserve information.

Request:

Would it be possible to make the Advanced Bracketing even more advanced  adding a way to store in memory a set of different exposure values previously measured?

In this "Custom Advanced Bracketing (CAB)" you would have let's say 2, 3 or 4 memories: lights and shadows; lights, midtones and shadows or lights midtones 1, midtones 2 and shadows.

This feature could work in two ways. One could be, after you access the CAB you measure highlights and press SET to store that EV in memory, measure midtones and press SET, ... and so on. Another way, even cooler, could be using the AF box to define where those areas of interest are. You could move the AF box to a window and press SET, then move the AF box to the wall and define midtones and move the box to a shadow and store in memory where the shadows are. In the CAB settings you could then tell ML where you want those areas to fall in the zone system, for example memory 1 (highlights) Zone IX, memory 2 (midtones 1) Zone VII, memory 3 (midtones 2) Zone XI and memory 4 (shadows) Zone IV. This way, knowing ML where to measure, you could get the perfect bracketing several times just pressing the shutter button, without having to manually measure again when, for example a cloud changes the brightness of the exterior or you decide to turn on or off some lights.