Expose to the Wrong

[Music] hey photographers someone told me once that you should expose to the right you may have heard the same thing let me tell you why someone might say that and why you may not want to follow their advice they're referring to the histogram which doesn't appear on your screen by default it may appear when you press the disk or display key or you may have to find a settings menu option to activate it the Instagram indicates the brightness level from left to right left is the dark side the up and down axis shows the number of pixels at that level peaks on the Left indicate a dark image on the right a bright image and the histogram can help you judge your exposure with more detail then the meter provides an ideal histogram is centered like this one and the theory behind the exposed to the right idea is that brighter better exposed pixels contain more information than dark ones that's true and in the digital world more data is a good thing well yes and no as not all scenes nor all sensors suffer the effects of low exposure and getting to the right may create other unwanted side effects and of course one rule simply can't work for all situations and you know rules are made to be broken I'm going to start with a quick exposure refresher use the links in the description to skip ahead let's configure the tools and find the ways to determine if an image is properly exposed that starts with the meter and on most cameras that won't appear until you select manual mode for aperture and shutter and turn off auto ISO on some cameras it's a linear display on others it's a numerical one when the meter is zero or points the image is properly exposed according to the cameras computer anyway the camera has several meter options the most commonly used one to judge the overall exposure of a scene is called matrix metering alternatives are center-weighted to expose the center properly when it's surrounded by a brighter or darker areas and spot when you want a specific object in the scene exposed properly this nikon also has a high light weighted option my usual approach is to set the aperture to achieve the depth of field I want a larger aperture which is a smaller f-stop sorry yes that's confusing we'll create a smaller depth of field for a blurred background or vice versa smaller apertures will focus more of the scene and then I set the shutter speed to capture the action slower shutter speeds like 15 will blur movement faster like 500 will freeze action and finally to get a proper exposure I set the ISO now just to digress here I do usually use auto ISO which would do that last step setting the ISO automatically so now this scene according to the meter is properly exposed the centered histogram seems to agree and now's a good time to repeat my don't be a slave to the meter mantra you are not trying to please the meter with your settings you're trying to create an image that tells the story captures a moment or sets a mood all of your settings should serve that goal and if that means that the meter isn't at zero or the histogram isn't centered don't worry particularly if you're shooting raw as you'll have the ability to make adjustments if it turns out that they're needed in Lightroom or your favorite photo editor and if you want an out of camera image meters or random generic advice from strangers may not always be helpful there is one more tool highlight alert which flashes areas that are overexposed not all cameras have this you'll have to turn it on in settings and sometimes it's a feature that's only available while reviewing your images in playback now the reason to pay attention to this one is that overexposed highlights are much more difficult to recover than underexposed shadows when an image is overexposed the alert looks like this let's return our ISO to a proper exposure and that's my ideal version of this image I could snap the shutter and take this directly to print from an out of camera JPEG so what happens if we follow the exposed to the right advice first which setting should we increase increasing the ISO might add noise opening the aperture changes the depth of field so I'm choosing to slow the shutter now hopefully that doesn't cause the image to blur but that seems unlikely particularly as I'm using a tripod and of course we could make slight adjustments to all three let's slow the shutter and watch the histogram shift right we want to get it as far to the right as possible without over exposing it's brighter than the image I want so we'll have to take it to Lightroom where we can have a closer look at these two images this is the properly exposed image let's have a look at the detail in the dark areas this is one to one on this 45 megapixel image and you're probably not getting the full effect even if you're playing this video at 4k the to the right image is hot reducing it by the 1.3 stop was overexposed makes them roughly equal is the detail in the shady areas different I don't see it I've posted them on Flickr if you'd like to check them out would a larger change in shutter speed like the three stops between these images make a difference I'm bumping the properly exposed image of a stop and the other down to to match them up again I don't see that the image which started out overexposed has any more or any cleaner detail what you will notice in the upper right is the quality of the sky has changed because we've lost tone in the brightest parts of the image now how about three stops under can that be recovered yes but now the detail on the door is definitely noisier as sometimes a chart can illustrate what's happening a little more clearly this is the DSC labs cam align to keep this test as clean as possible I'm going to change only the shutter speed that means that the aperture setting f/4 and ISO 200 remain constant then I'm concentrating on the black to white chips on the chart to properly expose this image the shutter speed is 1 over 125 the meters at zero the histogram is nearly centered it comes close to the dark side but there's room on the right the spacing of the gray steps and I have the advantage of seeing this on a wave form is roughly equal to move the histogram to the right edge I'm opening the shutter to 150th the meters now one and one-third stops over highlight alert is just starting to appear the gradation between the brightest steps which was clear is visibly reduced let's take those raw files to Lightroom the properly exposed image is clearly too dark judging by either the histogram or the tone curve for this image I'd increase the exposure 0.5 and white by 50 on the tone curve middle gray is just high of center the chips are evenly distributed although the dark ones are better defined the to the right image also needs work middle gray is too high so I'm reducing the exposure 0.8 and then to release the crush in the lighter chips I'm increasing white here also by 50 now the images the tone curves and the histograms are nearly identical and the lesson here is that as long as you're shooting raw both images are suitably exposed and can be adjusted to provide a good result but let's push a little further let's set up a bracket that varies the exposure by three stops up and down the three stops down crushes the darkest chips they're nearly all the same tone and let's increase the exposure three and a half stops and the definition has returned bump up the whites 25 and we're back to more or less the same image histogram and tone curves with three steps up whites are clearly blown reduce the exposure to point five and the image gets back to normal but the whitest chips lack any definition they're gone although RAW files offer a lot of room for a recovery over exposing exposing to the right can be worse than under there's an audio analogy for this with a digital recording if the recording is too low even by a considerable margin it can be recovered to a good level with very little deterioration however if the levels are too high either the sound will suffer from the crunchy compression applied by the camera's compressor or a limiter or just outright distortion and neither of those can be undone audio is similar in another way the decibel scale is logarithmic just like f stops it takes three DB decibels to double the volume just like it takes three clicks to increase one stop doubling the amount of light images have the advantage of having three parameters aperture shutter and ISO the audio has just one vol ISO is two digital images what volume is to sound it amplifies the captured signal now I've done this with one camera which one wasn't really important because you need to do the same thing yourself and the advantage of setting the exposure to your preference is that you've got an out of camera JPEG ready to go while the advantage of going to the right may be marginally cleaner reproduction in the shadows it comes at the expense of some dynamic compression in bright areas a noisy er overall image if you've used a higher ISO less than ideal aperture or a shutter speed that's not optimal if exposing to the right is something you'd like to explore take a minute to determine how many stops you'd like to add and then set up bracket mode to take the images further to the right here continuous bracket requires burst mode now not only will you be able to compare exactly between the three images but you'll also have the out of camera image with the exposure that you prefer the Nikon I'm using varies the shutter speed the approach I prefer check the exif to see what your camera is doing when you use exposure bracket and if you're alternating between bracket and HDR use the cameras user settings to record these two and switch quickly between them I hope this helps if you have relevant questions or civil comments I will read and reply to them all and I'm also happy to welcome new subscribers to my channel it's mostly reviews some tutorials like this you will become a better photographer if you keep shooting until your battery is empty and your memory card is full thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Maarten Heilbron

Views: 29,477

Keywords: Expose to the right, Exposure settings, Exposure tips, Photography, Maarten Heilbron, maartech, Photo tips

Id: B_2srDFpoe0

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Mon May 11 2020