What everyone gets wrong about Exposing To The Right

exposing to the right is one of the best ways to set yourself up for success in your color grade but there's one critical detail about exposing to the right that many of us Overlook let's take a look here inside of resolve and see if we can't get a better understanding of exposing to the right so the first thing that I want to show you is just a series of images that are exposed to the middle to the right and then to the left I want us to get a sense of what the end benefit of all this talk of exposing to the right is what does this actually do for us when it comes time to grade and finalize our images before we talk about how we get there and how we don't get there so for our Baseline here we have an image that is quote unquote exposed to the middle this is just a normal healthy exposure it is neither underexposed or underexposed okay and what I'm going to do for the sake of demonstration today is we're going to zoom way in on this image so that we can really see its texture because texture is going to become one of the big things that we emphasize today and we're talking about the difference between different exposure levels we're going to see texture change as we go through these different levels of exposure so I'm zoomed in here and what I want to do from here is go over to shot number four which is exposed one stop to the right and then I have pulled that stop here inside of resolve so the end reproduction of the image is going to be at the same exposure level and we're going to see what other differences remain when we have normalized for that exposure push okay so from shot three to four here's where we end up and if you look in the region kind of off to the right of my subject's face you can see that the noise is somewhat diminishing in this scenario right you can even see it in the lamp shade over here when I expose one stop to the right I'm getting less noise than I had a moment ago and again I'm exposing to the right and then here in this node I am pulling one even photometric stop of exposure to compensate so that the end reproduction is the same and of course that's the goal when we're talking about exposing to the right we're not talking about getting a Brighter Image for brighter's sake or saying Brighter Images are better than dark images because we like to look at Brighter Images rather we're saying there is some other kind of benefit to the great ability of our image when we expose to the right we're going to talk more about that in the coming minutes here but if we look at this shot this is one stop exposed to the right and we can see the change even when we compensate for that there's still a net change in the texture and in the noise of the image let's go now two stops to the right where once again we are two stops exposed to the right and I have pulled two stops to compensate so we are seeing a net neutral reproduction in terms of exposure but we're going to see some other changes when we advance to this shot so here in this case even less noise right and this is one of these series that is easier to look at if we go from beginning to end so let's look at middle exposure two stops exposed to the right this right here is the value prop of exposing to the right this is a cleaner image that I have on shot number five it's a cleaner image right now and just as importantly it's going to give us more flexibility when it comes time to grade this image I can do more for you with this image than I can do for you with this image as your colorist okay and to make an even more dramatic example of this let's just quickly look at what would have happened if we had exposed to the left so I'm now going to look to the left of my middle exposure here and we can see in shot number two in this case I have exposed one stop to the left and I have added a stop so again net reproduction of the exposure is the same but there's been a change in the texture of my image you can see I'm getting more noise here in shot number two right let's now go to shot number one this is two stops exposed to the left again two stops then compensated for in resolve so we're getting the same net reproduction but we're going to see the change in noise level when we go to shot number one shot number one has quite a bit of noise in it at this point doesn't it and if we really want to get the full dramatic comparison we can go from two stops exposed to the left which is what we're looking at right now versus two stops exposed to the right which image would you rather have just at a baseline if we didn't do any color grading whatsoever I think most of us would probably choose shot number five as opposed to shot number one but even if we wouldn't even if you say oh I like that little bit of grain or Texture in there I want to challenge you to notice that if I do a new note and you ask me to do something like dig out some detail from the subject's hair for example if I go in and I try to do that for you here on shot number five that information is there right it's simply a matter of what I'm going to do to dig it out while maintaining an overall reproduction of this image that I really really like but that information is there it's present in her hair if we go over here to shot number one and you give me that same note hey what can you do what can you pull out of her hair there's nothing in there but noise right we are at the noise floor of our camera sensor and this this idea of a noise floor is really where the Merit of exposing to the right comes in because what we are doing when we expose to the right is we are getting off of the noise floor of our sensor if you imagine for a moment that I were to shoot a sixth exposure uh in this series that sixth exposure would just be a lens cap over the lens and I just roll a quick clip of that to capture a clip with the lens cap on what would I say I'd see pure black right there's no light hitting that sensor but it wouldn't be that simple I would actually see noise wouldn't I and what I would see specifically is the noise floor that standing level of noise that is in the sensor that is what I see when my sensor is receiving no image or no light that floor of noise is what we're trying to move off of and get our image out of when we expose to the right so that's the value prop of exposing to the right and you can see hopefully nice and clearly in this series what we get by exposing to the right versus exposing to the middle or worst of the set if we expose to the left and we're actually getting too little light hitting our sensor okay now let's work backwards from there now we know why we might want to expose to the right let's work backwards from there and talk about how this might actually go when you are on set shooting so let's go back to our Baseline I'm going to go back to shot number three and we're going to talk through a common workflow for exposing to the right which would be okay I'm going to configure my lights I'm going to configure my camera I'm going to set up my lens I'm going to get my scene set up and get my frame set up and I'm going to expose it normally in such a way that I am happy right that would be exposing to the middle and whether we're talking about exposing to the right or exposing to the left everything is based off of a middle of some sort right it's the question comes up naturally of like well to the right of what so in our hypothetical uh shoot that we are doing right now what we are exposing to the right of would be a healthy middle normal looking exposure like we're looking at right here so we're right here and we know we've heard that we want to expose to the right that that can net us some benefits in our color grade for our image how do we go about that what do we do to expose to the right well there are multiple things that we could do one of them would be to change the amount of light hitting our sensor we could actually increase our key light or our fill light or our overall lighting level in the scene we could open up the stop on our lens those would be two ways of actually admitting more light onto our sensor which is how we expose to the right but there's a third strategy that's often used to expose to the right that is to set your Baseline exposed to the middle frame like we just talked about and then to raise your ISO and on paper that sounds kind of sensible doesn't it because if you raise your ISO what happens you get a Brighter Image we can prove that out if I go to shot number two here and I take this plus one node this is a photometric stop of exposure and I'm going to copy this and go back to shot number three and paste this node this is exactly what you would see if you were to change the rating of your camera from 800 ISO which is the iso of this image here to 1600 ISO and that's the thing that I want to emphasize to you is that ISO is not exposing to the right when you increase it because you are not actually increasing the amount of light hitting your sensor you are brightening your image in the same way that I'm brightening the image right now you're processing the signal you are literally what's called gaining the signal you can see here in my primaries I am adding gain in a linear tone curve I am doubling the amount of light that's one stop I'm adding gain to a signal that has already been captured so what's going to happen if you take this strategy well there's a couple of possibilities none of them are that great though the first one is that you're really not getting any healthier of an exposure than you were before but to boot you now no longer have the ability to evaluate your image and connect with your image because you're looking at a brighter reproduction than you ultimately intend to see so how are you going to evaluate the fine nuances of the way that your fill light is positioned and the way that you are you know positioning your various lights and setting up your scene you are losing your relationship with your scene because you're looking at a reproduction which does not meaningfully represent the end reproduction that you want to see and honestly that's the best case scenario you lose your relationship with your image a bit and you end up with no stronger of an image than you had before that's the best case scenario worst case scenario you're looking at an image like this and either consciously or without even noticing you look at the image and you do a very natural thing which is to say hey we actually don't need all the light that we have do we we could close down the iris a little bit we could dim down our lights or take away some lights and you're going to end up in your Lighting in the amount of light hitting the sensor getting back to an exposure level that feels more like you had before that more represents what you ultimately intend to see that would be a very understandable thing to do whether you're doing it intentionally or sort of subconsciously just as a result of looking at the image and fussing with things and that's arguably the even worse scenario because now not only is your image no stronger than it was before it's actually worse off because you haven't exposed to the right you have exposed to the left you've actually caused less light to hit your camera sensor than you would have if you had just stayed right there at 800 ISO to begin with so you might fall into one of those categories you may have experienced both out there when you're shooting but those are the two scenarios that are going to come about when you think about exposing to the right as a matter of increasing ISO either you are increasing it and then you're really getting no better of a result and you're losing your relationship with your image or worse you are increasing it and ending up compensating for The Brighter Image by shutting down your lens or by reducing the amount of light in your scene neither are good outcomes and neither of those are exposing to the right if you want to expose to the right I want to emphasize something the only way to expose to the right is to increase the amount of light hitting your sensor that's it so how do we do that well you can do that with your iris you can do that with your shutter angle you can do that with the light in your scene but you have to actually change the amount of light hitting your sensor ISO actually cannot expose you to the left or to the right but what it can do is bias your decisions in a proper direction so as a final thought as a final idea for you if you do want to use ISO to Aid you in exposing to the right what you would actually want to do is lower your ISO because if you lower your ISO you will get essentially this reproduction of the same exposure that we were talking about here a moment ago but if you do this and then you compensate by putting more light in your scene opening up your lens doing something to change the amount of light hitting your sensor now you are using ISO to cause you to bias more exposure onto your sensor as opposed to less so I wanted to give us a clear sense first of all of what benefit exposing to the right really Nets us in a color grade because it's big and I'm a really big believer in capturing a stronger rather than a weaker signal but I also wanted to talk about some of the ways that we can go about exposing to the right that can net us no better of a result than we would have gotten by exposing to the middle or worse yet an even less strong image because we have ended up inadvertently exposing to the left

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 27,382

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Id: aB8ku9ET-dw

Length: 12min 32sec (752 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 08 2023