[Jim Dockery]

A good article on The Luminous Landscape, The Optimum Digital Exposure, on getting the most out of our digital cameras. He talks about expose to the right (seemingly over expose). If your snow pictures tend to come out gray and dull this could really help, but it also works to optimize shadow areas in a high contrast scene. Only applies to photo geeks who process RAW.

[Bedivere]

I've been following that principal (expose to the right) for awhile now but it can bite you in the ass sometimes. Most notably you run the risk of losing color fidelity in the more brightly lit areas. It's definitely a great technique for high contrast scenes where you want to be able to get the most shadow detail possible without losing highlight detail.

[Jaberwock]

Dark things look better darker, light things look better lighter.

[Bedivere]

LOL, umm, yeah, okay. But what does that have to do with the concept at hand?

[NacMacFeegle]

I can't say I completely understand this, is the idea to measure the brightest highlight and then expose the whole image to match it? I guess I'll have to read the article more thoroughly and try it for myself.

[Bedivere]

The concept really only works when shooting RAW then post-processing. You *can* do it with jpegs, but you have so much less latitude. The idea is to over-expose the image, as long as you're not blowing (losing detail in)the highlights. This actually captures more light detail, dramatically improves shadow detail, and reduces noise, especially in the shadows. The histogram curve will be fatter to the right side (lighter areas) instead of more centered or more in the shadows. The picture will look washed out but you can then bring the highlights, midtones, etc. back down in post to bring back the detail and color saturation and give the image the contrast it needs to look good. I generally meter the brightest area in the picture then over-expose that by about 1.5 stops when doing this. As long as there is no spike at the right edge of the histogram you'll be able to recover the highlight detail. 14 bit RAW files just have so much more information in them than 8 bit jpegs it's simply amazing what you can do with highlights and shadows with them.

[NacMacFeegle]

I use a combination of Jpeg and RAW files (generally based on how tricky the lighting conditions are and whether or not I'm running out of space on my memory card). Up until now I've been using pretty dark exposures in order to preserve details in the highlights, and I've noticed how this results in less detail in dark areas. I'll have to try this new method and see if it gets me better quality photos!

[Bedivere]

Here's an example This is straight off the sensor, no processing:

As you can see, there is a bright sky and a lot of foreground in shadow. I need to get as much detail as I can in both the bright area and the shadowed area. If I expose for the shadow, I'll blow out the sky. If I expose for the sky I crush the shadows and lose detail there. So, I meter the sky and over expose it as much as I can without blowing any highlights. The histogram is pushed right up to the right edge of the graph without any spikes indicating loss of detail. While there's a big lump at the left end in the shadows, it doesn't actually spike in the shadows or touch the left side of the histogram, indicating I've retained the maximum amount of detail I can. Now I can bring up the shadows and bring down the highlights and get as much detail as possible out of this image and make it look more like it did to the eye. Note that there's still a fair amount of noise in the shadows in this one (not that you can tell in the blurry mess Photobucket serves up), but less than there would've been if exposing for the sky and a lot more detail was preserved. This scene is actually an excellent candidate for HDR or at least some exposure blending. I really need to start utilizing those techniques as well... So here's what I came up with after post processing:

[Cyclopath]

It was a very difficult choice, but I voted for that picture in the calendar.

[Cyclopath]

I just want my pictures to look good. I'm not practicing science where I'd be out taking faithful measurements of what color things are and how much light they reflect, I'm making art. I want my pictures to look as realistic as possible, but that's not the same thing as saying they need to be exact reproductions of what I'm looking at. You just have to feel like you could be standing there when you look at them. So it kind of depends. I tend to use spot metering and pick out what's important, and a lot of the time I wind up choosing my exposure based on the sky. Exposing right is usually a good technique (if you're going to use the raw file) but there are times when it's not really appropriate. The highlights get squished, and it can be tricky to figure out just how far to the right in some high contrast scenes, like at twilight, where most of the image is very dark but there are subtle highlights you want to preserve. But that's what bracketing, the screen, and memory cards that hold more than 24 exposures are for.

[Bedivere]

Thank you Cyclopath. And I agree with your assessment. It's a useful technique, but not always the right technique. If there are subtle details in the highlights you can sometimes lose them by pushing the exposure too far. Still, it's really incredible what you can pull out of a 14 bit RAW file. Heck, even 12 bit RAW is pretty darned good.