We're all doing it wrong (unless you ETTR)

GTRacer · 9 Aug 2011 at 21:01

I've been doing this all the time with my Fuji S5, it's nice having extra headroom in the highlights.

Raymond Lin · 9 Aug 2011 at 21:02

Under the eyebrow?

What about mine? I don't see any noise and i am not scared about blowing highlights, if that is your point. I actually like it in small doses...it's part of my style.

Hair clip by Raymondlin, on Flickr

An Exception · 9 Aug 2011 at 21:07

GTRacer said:
I've been doing this all the time with my Fuji S5, it's nice having extra headroom in the highlights.

Yeh it comes in really handy at times, however it's not so good if your camera suffers with banding issues in the shadows, as that severely limits how far you can push the shadows, so the viability of this technique effectively depends on what camera you use, as the 5Dii for example starts banding pretty quickly.

An Exception · 9 Aug 2011 at 21:11

Raymond Lin said:
Under the eyebrow?

What about mine? I don't see any noise and i am not scared about blowing highlights, if that is your point. I actually like it in small doses...it's part of my style.

Hair clip by Raymondlin, on Flickr

Raymond, it's a tiny bit of noise at 100% crop, tbh this turned out a little more under exposed than I would have liked, but I think it came out fine.

As for blowing out a few highlights being your style, it may well be, but it's not like you have much choice either in scenes with such varying light intensity with a 5Dii, as you just haven't got the room to boost shadows before running into banding...

Raymond Lin · 9 Aug 2011 at 21:15

Banding is never on the agenda for me.

Get the moment, exposed correctly and composition. Banding never cross my mind, ever.

What exactly do you mean by "varying in light intensity"?

Like this?

IMG_1651 by Raymondlin, on Flickr

An Exception · 9 Aug 2011 at 22:14

No I'm referring to the below difference in light intensity...

5Dii Original

Boosted shadows

Raymond Lin · 9 Aug 2011 at 22:19

But the noise ?

And it's the same thing, if you'd seen the original, the ground buildings are/were darker.

An Exception · 9 Aug 2011 at 22:24

Can't see any noise tbh, but then again you would't expect to see any with such a small file.
Maybe you could post a 100% crop of the bottom left corner? perhaps even a before and after, as you can't tell how much you pushed the shadows, and without that info I can't really form an opinion...

MikeHunt79 · 9 Aug 2011 at 22:26

It's worth reading this also: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml

There are quite a few parallels here with audio sampling, and s/n ratio, mainly due to the fact that our eyes and ears are log as opposed to lin!

Am I right in assuming that all cameras have the same exposure compensation meters where moving the bar to the right gives a brighter image?

An Exception · 9 Aug 2011 at 22:29

^^^
Yeh you can do that with most if not all DSLR's, but you risk losing highlight detail...

Raymond Lin · 9 Aug 2011 at 22:31

Ejizz said:
Can't see any noise tbh, but then again you would't expect to see any with such a small file.
Maybe you could post a 100% crop of the bottom left corner? perhaps even a before and after, as you can't tell how much you pushed the shadows, and without that info I can't really form an opinion...

No, I meant your fruit.

An Exception · 9 Aug 2011 at 22:42

"On the other end of the EV scale, both cameras had trouble with +3EV. Fully a quarter of the K-5 image is blown out when the shot is pulled by -3EV in Lightroom. Unfortunately, overexposing to this degree is not something the sensor can handle. The 7D fares slightly better, indubitably boosted by its relative underexposure, but here too the resulting image isn't anything you'd want to show off. Predictably, at +5EV both cameras are hopelessly outmatched. The 7D's pulled shot looks like someone has run a Photoshop posterization filter on it, while the K-5's has hardly any detail left at all. The lesson here is that with both cameras it's a far better decision to expose to the left."

http://www.pentaxforums.com/reviews/canon-7d-vs-pentax-k-5-review/comparison.html#drtest

MikeHunt79 · 9 Aug 2011 at 22:45

Ejizz said:
^^^
Yeh you can do that with most if not all DSLR's, but you risk losing highlight detail...

Gotcha, thanks, you learn something new everyday.

I'll have to experiment with RAW files, as I so tend to find that my D60 tends to overexpose more than it underexposes.

robertgilbert86 · 9 Aug 2011 at 22:56

Ejizz, sorry but you're really not getting the point. I'm going to walk away now because your misunderstanding doesn't affect me.

Mike however has been given some bad advice. You won't lose highlight detail by ETTR correctly. The aim is to have the scene as greatly exposed as possible without blowing any highlights.

An Exception · 9 Aug 2011 at 23:05

robertgilbert86 said:
Ejizz, sorry but you're really not getting the point. I'm going to walk away now because your misunderstanding doesn't affect me.

Mike however has been given some bad advice. You won't lose highlight detail by ETTR correctly. The aim is to have the scene as greatly exposed as possible without blowing any highlights.

You seem to fail to see that shooting close to the edge in terms of what the sensor can record is impractical and damn right risky in many situations where you are not either in a controlled environment or you have plenty of opportunity to re-take the shot after checking your histogram or blinkies.

Sorry but it's you who isn't understanding this properly...

Raymond Lin · 9 Aug 2011 at 23:10

Ejizz said:
You seem to fail to see that shooting close to the edge in terms of what the sensor can record is impractical and damn right risky in many situations where you are not either in a controlled environment or you have plenty of opportunity to re-take the shot after checking your histogram or blinkies.

Sorry but it's you who isn't understanding this properly...

You are basically playing safe by purposely underexposing every shot just in case you blown some highlights and in turn introducing noise to all your shots, even where light is in abundance. i.e. daylight? :confused:

An Exception · 9 Aug 2011 at 23:20

MikeHunt79 said:
Gotcha, thanks, you learn something new everyday.

I'll have to experiment with RAW files, as I so tend to find that my D60 tends to overexpose more than it underexposes.

You camera is easily fooled by the colour within a scene, but the issue comes when the camera tries to expose the extremes within a scene in either highlights or shadows as 18% grey.

For example if your photographing something white, your camera will try to expose the scene so it looks 18% grey and will under expose the scene.

If your taking a photo of something back, the opposite is true and the camera over exposes the scene until black looks 18% grey.

It's this variability that makes ETTR impractical and dangerous in allot of circumstances, as one minute you could be photographing a scene that is light in colour and because your ETTR your actually achieving the correct exposure, but then if you was to shoot something with allot of very dark (and the camera meters off that) colours within the scene, then the camera will over expose and if there are also some very light colours within the scene, then this detail will likely be lost.

An Exception · 9 Aug 2011 at 23:27

Raymond Lin said:
No, I meant your fruit.

I didn't take the shot of the fruit, if my camera produced banding like that, then I wouldn't be ETTL.

http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=898881

An Exception · 9 Aug 2011 at 23:48

Raymond Lin said:
You are basically playing safe by purposely underexposing every shot just in case you blown some highlights and in turn introducing noise to all your shots, even where light is in abundance. i.e. daylight?

Yeh, I'm playing it safe, if I'm in a controlled environment will some time on my hands I expose 100% manually (because it's more consistent, but mainly because it's more fun), if on the other hand I'm letting my camera decide what my exposure should be then I ETTL as this act's as a form of insurance, as I personally hate over exposed areas of images that have lost all texture, I personally would feel like I missed the shot.

This insurance allows me to concentrate on the task at hand, communicating with my subjects as opposed to breaking connection constantly to check my LCD for over exposure.

And you keep on insisting about this noise issue where you need to view a file at 100% to even faintly see it and to me is definitely the lesser of two evils.

And when does anyone even print their images at 100% and make use of all those mega pixels.
The images out of a D7K are still huge when downsized 50%, so I actually just started to do this with all my images now as I just don't need 100% sized files.

Below is the same image as posted earlier, only now at 50% crop, maybe it's just me, but I think the IQ is more than acceptable...

Edit: Of course I could use noise reduction if I wanted to, but I'm not a fan of that.

Raymond Lin · 10 Aug 2011 at 00:00

Whatever works for you I guess

Just hope you don't start shooting at ISO6400 and then try to push 4 stops that's all.

Ejizz said:
This insurance allows me to concentrate on the task at hand, communicating with my subjects as opposed to breaking connection constantly to check my LCD for over exposure.

btw...what kind of subject? If you mean shots like these 2 posed gentleman here, you have all the time in the world.

Try shooting a Bride walking down the aisle.