I had been using a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV since 2017 and a Canon EOS 6D for a few years before that. I am very familiar with Canon’s limitations in terms of how far you can lift the shadows in scenes with a wide dynamic range and how much you can crank up the exposure if an image is underexposed. From night scenes to architectural interiors, it became second nature to understand how many exposures I would need to take at various shutter speeds in order to capture both highlights and shadows. The 5D Mark IV was a slight improvement over the 6D, but I had also become aware of how Sony’s sensors were better at handling shadows and high dynamic range scenes. Some Canon shooters were even starting to make the switch or contemplating the move. I had numerous Canon lenses, but I was seriously considering switching to Sony. It seemed like a pain to sell all my lenses and switch brands, but wouldn’t the sensor improvements be worth it?

Then Canon announced the R5.

Me: “OK, fine…I’ll at least try the R5 before I mess around with switching camera brands.”

So, has Canon improved their camera bodies’ ability to lift shadows and increase exposure with underexposed images? Is there going to be a noticeable difference compared to the 5D Mark IV?

Let’s take a look!

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I decided to subject the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV and the Canon EOS R5 to a painful test… taking a photo at night and then cranking the exposure to +5 in Adobe Lightroom.

For the below comparison, I placed each camera on a tripod and used the exact same Canon EF 16-35 f/2.8L III lens (using the Canon Mount Adapter EF-EOS R with the R5) and took a picture of a lakeside deck at night. Both of these photos were taken after astronomical twilight and before moonrise, so the night was as dark as it was going to get.

Each photo was 8 seconds at 24mm, with an aperture of 7.1 and ISO set to 400.

And now it's time for the painful part. Let’s see what happens when we push these RAW images to Exposure +5 in Adobe Lightroom and reduce the Highlights to -100.

Wow! I was amazed when I saw the results. You can see the sky on the 5D Mark IV image has a greenish tint with purple bands going through it and lots of color noise, whereas the R5 somehow managed to pull what appears to be the correct colors in the sky with less color noise and no noticeable banding. Cranking the exposure to +5 on a night scene was clearly too great of a feat to pull off for the 5D Mark IV, but the R5 was able to handle it. We will take a look at some crops from this image a bit later, but first…

Random but Semi-Relevant Sidetrack

It’s pretty rare to have a legitimate reason to crank the exposure to +5, but the banding issue on the 5D Mark IV happened to me once when I was only at Exposure +2 while editing a real estate image in an unusual situation in 2018.

Is this a scene from Lord of the Rings in the mines of Moria? No…I was by myself shooting a foreclosed house with no electricity in the middle of nowhere, and I was in the pitch black basement with only a tiny window reminding me that daylight would once again shine on my face. Because I was in a hurry to get out of there before I woke the balrog, I did a run-’n-gun 12-image exposure bracket at ISO 400 that included a 30 second image. I also fired a separate speedlight shot at the window to control the hot spot. At a quick glance I thought the 30 second image would be enough to give me all the information I would need from the dark areas, but as you can see in the images below, I ended up with a horizontal green band that went across the center of the image and affected the shadows (shown just above the white line).

Canon 5D Mark IV, 30 seconds, ISO 400, f/7.1:

Here is a closer look at the green band from the 30 second exposure in two crops of the brightened RAW file (in the first crop image, the band only appears in the darkest areas on the left):

This situation was obviously extreme and unusual, and I basically made a mistake because I was in a hurry to get out of there. If I was being my normal meticulous self, I could have opened the aperture to f/4 or flipped the camera to bulb mode and done a 2-minute shot to make sure I had quality shadows. But this is one mistake I made that the R5 could probably handle, whereas the 5D Mark IV caused me to spend extra time in Photoshop fixing the green band. After blending multiple ambient exposures with my speedlight shot and muting the green band using Photoshop, here is the final image:

Sidetrack Over - Back to the Night Scene

Back to the original night scene… here is a crop of the sky from each camera so we can see the difference close up.

You can see small banding/stripes with the 5D Mark IV in addition to the larger purple bands, but the R5 image is fairly smooth with better color and no noticeable banding, even in these crops. The sky in the 5D Mark IV image is essentially unusable. The R5 shows some noise as a result of raising the exposure to +5, but if you look at the whole image earlier in the article, it becomes apparent that you could make a mistake that significantly underexposes a photo but still end up with a usable photo with the R5. The R5 photo has some noise, but it is not catastrophic. This is a giant leap in performance over any of Canon’s previous photo camera bodies.

Here is another crop from the +5 exposure crank:

Again we see the 5D Mark IV pickup green in the deep shadows below the white board, but the R5 manages to have more detail, less noise, and better color.

Below is a crop of one of the hot spots, so we can see how the highlights are handled:

These hotspot areas are not very exciting to look at (in fact, it hurts my brain), but we can actually see that there is more detail around the edge of the hot spot in the R5 image. The R5 allows you to see the shape of the light spread more than the 5D Mark IV, and we can see more of the wood texture near the left edge of the highlight by the screw. Not very exciting, but it’s nice to see that highlight handling also appears to be slightly improved.

Another interesting observation is how much better the noise looks around the hotspot above the railing. The R5’s higher resolution sensor makes the noisy pixels smaller, which contributes to an overall smoother appearance.

Another Exposure Crank, Just for Fun

I did an architectural photoshoot recently that included twilight photos, and one of the cameras I had setup was the Canon EOS R5. Just for fun, I took an underexposed photo and cranked it to +4.35 in Adobe Lightroom. Here are the original and modified photos, along with what the final image looked like after blending multiple ambient exposures:

This is so much better than any of Canon’s previous camera bodies! Although I like the look of the final image better after spending time blending multiple exposures, look at how close to the final image I was able to come by simply cranking the exposure to +4.35 and dropping highlights to -100! The original photo makes you think no information was captured in the grass, trees, bushes, or other seemingly lost areas. But somehow the information is there, with a minor but acceptable noise penalty, and you can bring it out the completely dark areas with some simple sliders in Lightroom. Crazy!

Conclusion

I have produced tens of thousands of final images using the Canon EOS 6D and Canon EOS 5D Mark IV. When I switched from the 6D to the 5D Mark IV, I did notice a slight improvement in dynamic range and shadow handling. But this is a major advancement for Canon who had previously been dabbling with small, incremental improvements here and there. Going from the EOS 5D Mark IV to the EOS R5 is not a small, incremental improvement… it’s like a whole new generation of technology.

Other advantages the R5 has over the 5D Mark IV that I’ve found useful already:

50% increase in resolution (45-megapixels instead of 30)
“Focus Guide” for manual focusing, even if your lens doesn’t have AF (it allows you to place a focus point on your screen that indicates if a subject is in focus, focused too far to infinity, or too far towards close)
Exceptional Eye AF for people and animals
Access to all of Canon’s lenses, whether they are EF or RF mount (EF mount lenses require Canon’s EF to EOS R mount adapter)

If you’re debating the upgrade from a previous Canon camera body, I hope this article provided useful information. If you found this article helpful, feel free to use a product link from this page, and I’ll get a small commission. Thanks!