People have been asking me if the dynamic range on the Sony a6300 can compare to more expensive DSLR cameras.

For me, when making tests and comparisons like this, it all comes down to what I see with my own eyes and how a camera performs in a real world situation. I don’t really base much on the numbers. The proof is in the pudding.

So when it comes to dynamic range, one thing I look for is to see just how well I can pull color and detail out of an area of very dark shadow or the ability to recover detail in areas of overexposed highlights.

The first real test with the a6300 was when I had a section of wall area that was in deep, dark shadow from a shot that I took of some beautiful Buddha statues in a Buddhist temple in Bangkok.

At the far left upper corner of the frame in the image below (which is the original image right out of the camera) you can see a section of wall that is in total darkness.

Below is a closeup of that area and, as you can see, some of the faces of the statues are also too bright and it appears there could be some loss of highlight detail in those faces as well. 

I then applied the exposure brush in Adobe Camera Raw to increase brightness in the dark area by about 3 stops and, as you will see in the exposure corrected section below, there was a lot of good color information still left in the Raw file. I also darkened some of the faces where I felt they were too bright and I removed a green color cast from some of the faces which you can see appearing in the original image above. See my post here about how to remove color casts like this.

As you can see below, I was able to recover quite a bit of color and detail in the faces as well.

Of course bringing out color and detail in such a dark area of shadow at the upper left did bring out a fair amount of noise, but the noise filters in Camera Raw also easily took care of that too. Below were my noise reduction settings.

I also applied a slight whitening vignette at the edges in Camera Raw to add a bit of extra lightening to that edge. Below were my vignette settings.

Below is the full frame image of the enlarged section I had edited above. No noise, lightened in some areas, and darkened in others. But when we zoom out it still looks a bit dark in that upper left corner. 

So below is a second version where I went back in and lightened the dark a bit more. 

So back to the question of the dynamic range on the a6300 and how it compares. Sony talks of 15 stops of dynamic range on this camera. But again those are just numbers. What I feel is that it compares very well to other cameras I use and that the Sony a6300 offers enough dynamic range to recover lost shadows in even a very challenging, high contrast lighting situation like this. So it passes the test for me.

If you would like to have this image of the Buddha statues for your own use you can acquire it here at up to a 21MP file size from ThaiFotos.com.

As always, if you have any questions or comments please feel free to post them. And please kindly like this post by clicking on some of the social media icons below to share it with your friends.