Let shadows be shadows

How I find beauty in the obscured

By Michael Wilson

February 17^th, 2025

Back when I first picked up a camera, like 20 years ago, every editing tutorial seemed to preach the same thing: crank those whites and highlights way down to -100, and then blast the shadows and blacks up to +100.

The idea was to create this high dynamic range look and recover detail in both the brights and the darks. Makes sense, I guess, considering how limited digital cameras were back then.

It took me a while to break that habit, though, because the street photography style I love actually depends on those deep, dark shadows. So, I thought I'd share my approach to shooting and editing to really make those shadows pop.

The original shot

This bright digital ad totally grabbed my attention – especially how the lights reflected on the wet pavement. It was practically the only light source on the street, so everyone walking by created these awesome silhouettes. I snapped this shot through a bus shelter window (you can probably tell it was a rainy London night by all the umbrellas!). I really liked the patterns the raindrops made on the glass, too.

One thing I always do when shooting at night is use negative exposure compensation, usually between -1 and -2. This basically tells my camera to embrace the darkness and choose settings that match the scene. If you take anything away from this, it's that you shouldn't be afraid to use negative exposure comp when you're shooting in low light!

Pulling the highlights and pushing the shadows

This is definitely not my usual editing style, but I thought I'd show you what happens when you push the whites/highlights all the way down to -100 and the shadows/blacks all the way up to +100.

Sure, you get more detail, but it's completely different from what I saw when I took the picture.

My final edit

Here's my final edit, which is much closer to what I envisioned when I took the shot.

I cropped in a bit tighter to really focus on the shop window.

My color grading preset uses a tone curve that darkens the shadows and gently lifts the highlights. From there, I brought the blacks down by -28 (I almost always reduce my blacks by at least -10) and tweaked the shadow slider to -9 to really deepen those beautiful darks.

I also pulled the highlights down a touch, -18, to recover some detail in the digital ad, but then I bumped the whites up +13 to give those brightest spots some pop against the darks.