All You Need to Know About a Circular Polarizer Film
Top Reasons to have a Polarizer film:
- Controls reflections on all types of tricky surfaces like water, glass, leaves, and sky.
- Enriches the color saturation
- Improves contrast for better picture quality
- Removes atmospheric haze for clarity
- Provides 1-2 stops of Neutral Density targeted for longer exposures
All polarizers are not created using good quality glass, so one should beware of the low quality circular polarizing film, as bad frames affect resolution, contrast, sharpness, and color. Polarizing glasses are made by sandwiching the “polarizing film” in the middle of 2 pieces of glass using special manufacturing processes and adhesives to compile into a single unit. If anything goes wrong with the circular polarizer film during this process, all rosy pictures can get ruined.
A polarizer frame has a front part of the filter that rotates freely. This rotation is what allows us to control the polarization effect. Depending on the present lighting conditions, the effect may be either subtle or dramatic, so paying attention to the details is crucial.
Below are instances of common subjects where circular polarizers are used.
Blue Sky
A circular polarizer film helps to darken the blue skies to highlight the clouds. This helps to capture both cloudy sunsets/sunrises or blue sky days.
Water
While capturing any scene having water in it, one is exposed to a huge amount of glare. A polarizer reduces the glare to bring out the true color of the water, and also to see through the detailing of other below surface objects like rocks.
Foliage
Leaves from bushes and trees naturally hold a significant amount of glare, especially when wet. The circular polarizer film allows us to bring out the true textures and colors of foliage.
Other than these, it also helps to control reflections from glass or paint during photography. It has a magical effect that cannot be evenly matched or done later by any editing software. Polarizing films are nothing less than a blessing for photographers helping them to reduce or remove all reflections for rich colors and better pictures.
