Lighting plays a crucial role when taking a photo. It can happen that the contrast between dark and bright areas is very high. This often results in a loss of a lot of details of the image. Especially when taking photos in an environment with strong lightning, this can happen.
Many cameras have thus a function that optimizes the contrast in such photos. Active D-Lighting extracts these shadow and highlight details and makes sure they are displayed on the photo. The function can be set to work automatically, detecting the lighting conditions by itself, or manually. Some cameras are even able to create two images, one with Active D-Lighting and one without.
Active D-Lighting is applied the very same moment the photo is taken. Only those parts of the image that would be affected by the loss of detail are processed by the optimization. Thanks to this, photos taken with Active D-Lighting switched on still show a natural contrast between bright and dark parts without losing details of the shot.