Problem with my "exposure/metering" I think
So, I seem to get a lot of flak for over exposing my photos. But when I take them and review them, they don't look overexposed on my LCD.
So am I just not able to see it, or do I not have enough confidence in my camera to lower the settings?
Because I have been told I have blown out the skies, even though the people in my appear exposed properly. Is there anything I can do to work on this addiction to over exposing?
So am I just not able to see it, or do I not have enough confidence in my camera to lower the settings?
Because I have been told I have blown out the skies, even though the people in my appear exposed properly. Is there anything I can do to work on this addiction to over exposing?
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If is hard to judge exposure from the LCD on the back of your camera. For most images, I prefer to use the histogram over trying to judge from the display.
If you do a lot of shooting on cloudy days, you will blow out skies. On overcast days, if you properly expose for the light on the ground the sky typically reads about 3 stops above middle grey which blows out on most cameras. You have a few choices: live with it, underexpose your subject by a stop, use a grad ND filter, or bracket and blend exposures.
Ok, thanks
Histogram over LCD, plus if your LCD will 'highlight' blown areas, that is good.
What type of metering do you use? I find Evaluative is good if everything is fairly close - no dark shadows, bright skies/lights - where the actual exposure latitude for the various elements is within 2 stops or so. But I rarely use that. I shoot Canon and use the partial or centerweighted most often. If bracketing, spot metering if my light meter would be useless (like the Grand Canyon).
With digital, the rule of thumb is to expose for the highlights since that is where the info is, but don't blow them out. I haven't processed them yet, but I just did an outdoor concert where the band was facing west at 4:00pm, the stage and curtains were dark and bathed in middle light.
Except for the main singer who was a little forward, in the sun, wearing white AND black and standing behind ... large ivory colored congas! So I ended up slightly overexposing for the congas and/or his face, since they were close in expsoure. This brought in the detail for the rest of the scene that would have been lost otherwise.
-Fleetwood Mac
I try to keep in mind what the general expsoure value for the existing light is also - shooting in manual helps a lot, but you have to actively monitor your exposure meter.
My LCD is set up to display blown highlights by blinking, and I tend to look at an R - G - B histogram if my camera body supports it, so that I can avoid blowing the RED channel, or the Green channel, or whatever.
Camera light meters are vastly better than they were years ago, but they still are reflective meters, and require interpretation as a result. Incident reading light meters are usually more accuarate, and require much less interpretation. Just not as convenient to use.
Shoot in RAW - it is more forgiving than jpgs for exposure. Or RAW + medium jpgs with the bigger CF cards available these days.
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Here is a quick and dirty example of what i was talking about:
#1 is the original shot: RAW converted to jpeg
#2 is same shot; But I tweaked it in ACR4: Dropped the exposure back, boosted the shadows (or black) a little, some Recovery, and cropped it. Not much else. I realize I need to clone out the mic cord, the background sky, and darken the drums, but I did these changes in < 5minutes in ACR, not PS.
While part of the drums is still slightly blown out (more than I like), I got the detail in his face and black shirt I wanted. If I had exposed for the congas, or the overall image, the whites would have been better but everything would be muddied and dark.
One other kind of odd thing. I actually keep my 5D set to EC +2/3 of a stop. If I leave at 0, more often than not pics are under exposed, no matter which metering I use (except Spot).
-Fleetwood Mac
- The LCD can not provide an accurate idea of your exposure. Just on issue to contend with is that the brightness of your LCD can be adjusted. Even the flashies are not a solid indicator.
- I use the LCD only for judging composition. On the various 1.6 crop Canon bodies, the view provided by the viewfinder ranges from 90% to 95% of the final image. This can have a affect on composition.
- Use the histogram for judging the exposure. Ideally, you want most of your peaks somewhere between the middle and the right end of the hisotgram. As a general rule of thumb, if you are shooting outdoors, and you have sun illuminated green vegatation, you should see a spike or curve hump somewhere just to the right of the middle of your histogram.
- Under very few circumstances will you have any histogram spikes right up against the right side of the graph. If you do, you probably have one or more blown channels.
For most of my shooting, I would love it if my cameras had a "Display only the histogram" mode, but they don't. Oh well.My Photos
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I'd like to offer some comments on your question. To some extent these comments will support previously supplied input by other responders, and to some extent I'll be taking a slightly different tack.
You basically have two approaches in solving your issue. One involves relying on the camera, and the other involves relying on Photoshop after the shot is taken. After some explanation, I'm going to come out in favor of the latter approach.
The camera based approach relies on intentionally underexposing relative to what your meter comes up with. The giant problem with this approach is that absent a very large preview, you have no way of doing this reliably. Your in-camera LCD screen is too small to do this effectively. With enough time and money, you might be able to hook up a high end monitor to a digital camera, but then you'd have to carry the monitor with you when you go out to shoot.
The Photoshop based approach can essentially take one of two forms. In the first form, you auto-bracket exposures using varying shutter speeds and later merge them to an HDR image in Photoshop. While this approach has alot of merit for outdoor architectural shooting, it generally has practical problems in landscape shooting. Wind will move leaves, shift cloud positions, etc. Your exposures will thus differ not only in exposure value, but also in actual content. The resulting HDR composite will thus substitute blurriness for the blown out clouds.
A second Photoshop based approach, the one I think will work in practice, is to utilize your camera's light meter to take a properly metered shot, without any exposure compensation. Then look at your histogram, and accept the shot as long as there is not excessive clipping at the white end. If too much highlight detail is being lost, then underexpose the same shot to replace the first one. Whether you take only the first shot, or need to the second as it's replacement, don't worry at this stage if your shot does not look good in your LCD (i.e., appears too dark or light), or for that matter even looks badly exposed in Photoshop when you first open it. The critical thing here is the absence of clipping - no clipping means no loss of information, and this is what makes it possible to post-process to get the results you want.
Continuing the discussion, I recommend very strongly that you shoot in RAW format. Just get some extra flash cards if you are worried about storage capacity. Shooting in RAW format will maximize the amount of color information you have available in the initial stages of post-processing, permitting better fine-tuning of your image (especially in the highlights you are concerned about). The Adobe Camera Raw interface provides sliders for making broad adjustments to your image, like white point, midpoint, black point, saturation, etc. You can use these sliders to make first pass, aggregate-level improvements to your picture. But, the most important thing you will do is further adjust your picture using the Adobe Camera Raw curves tool. Here you can create a custom tone curve for your image. Start with one of the presets that works well for the image, then experiment by moving the anchor points around. Then, add new points and move them around to further fine-tune if you are not yet satisfied. It takes a bit of practice to become good at this, but the results can be absolutely remarkable. Combining a good initial image (one that might look bad initially, but has minimal clipping, especially at the high end), with a well constructed tone curve, will fix your problem beautifully.
Let me try to explain why using RAW format is so important in this solution. Your camera's image sensor measures light in somewhat (though hardly exactly) your eyeball does. Double the light, and the measured value for that light doubles. In generating an image file for your flash card, your camera "linearizes" these measured light values, essentially damping an exponential curve into a linear one. While this facilitates creation of an image file your PC can work with, a certain amount of fine detail is lost in this process (mostly at the highlight end). Saving to your flash card as RAW, rather than JPG, minimizes this loss of detail (RAW files contain greater bit depth than JPG files, resulting in less effective "color averaging" of adjacent pixels). As long as you perform your tone curve adjustment in Adobe Camera Raw, before saving as an 8 bit PDF to perform final spotting/sharpening/etc., you will be able to maximize retention of fine details in your image, permitting skies to have high contrast, without specular blowouts.
Stu Engelman
It's just I would prefer to take get better at taking properly exposed shots, than to pray and hope it's fixable in PS.
Hello,
Without using curves in Adobe Camera Raw, you really won't be able to get a complete solution.
You can obtain a partial solution by learning the Ansel Adam's "Zone System". In a nutshell, you would meter the sky, and then compensate the exposure to force the sky to be exposed in the desired manner. The metering would be done in spot, rather than evaluative mode. Then you would under/over expose using your exposure compensation control to force the shot, after composing, to come down/up the estimated number of required stops. Needless to say, this technique, as with the one I recommended earlier, requires metering to be performed in full manual mode (so the components of exposure are not reset by the camera when you shoot).
The Zone System, once fully learned, will eliminate your blown away highlights because you are taking an explicit step to prevent white side clipping (the exposure compensation adjustment). The problem with this method is that if your desired EV "zone" for the sky is too low relative to a high dynmaic range in your composition (i.e., very bright sunlight with dark ground objects in your image), then your black end pixels will get clipped (muddy shadows being the result). Thus, while the Zone System approach reduces Photoshop effort (to a degree), it does not result in as high a quality level as my original approach (since the original approach controls both low and high end clipping, and the Zone System only controls high end clipping).
Stu
Ok, thanks