Panasonic Lumix DMC-GM1 review – Dynamic range
Image: Better dynamic range can be achieved by underexposing the image, then lightening shadows in post-production
When shooting brightly lit landscapes, the GM1 achieves good exposures that have a decent balance between highlight and shadow detail – for most situations there aren’t many areas of burnt-out detail. In more challenging high-contrast scenes the metering captures well-exposed midtones, but often loses some highlight information. When editing in Adobe Camera Raw, however, I noticed that a reasonable amount of information could be brought back in the highlight areas and more still could be recovered by lightening the shadows.
It was rare to see any shadow clipping, so to maximise the dynamic range I adjusted the exposure compensation to -1EV and lightened the shadows and midtones using Adobe Lightroom.
Like most new cameras, the GM1 offers a dynamic-range boosting function known here as iDynamic. This maximises details in the highlight and shadow areas, and can be set to a range of intensities. Even at its strongest setting, it is still much more subtle than much of the competition.
Also included are a high dynamic range creative scene mode and an HDR shooting mode. The latter shoots three separate images and stitches them together in-camera. When shooting handheld, I found that high-contrast edges would often show halos, and ghosting would also appear. This is better suited to use with a tripod.
