Better to overexpose or underexpose?

[Klose]

meter on midtones and the exposure shld be fairly alright (digital)

 

[LittleWolf]

meter on midtones and the exposure shld be fairly alright (digital)

With the camera I use most of the time, I find it MUCH more reliable to meter on the highlights I want to preserve. This almost always mandates gamma/curve adjustments on the computer (high contrast scenes will look too dark, and low-contrast scenes will look too bright), but ensures the best S/N ratio without clipping. Using raw mode helps to avoid the damage done by "intelligent" in-camera processing.

With slide film, one would normally also meter for the highlights ...

 

[Witness]

maintain the midtones at the correct exposure..taking care of not overexposing the highlights...

tt will give u a nice range to work on when editing...act this way, u dun even need to correct the exposure much,....

cheers.

 

[unseen]

I'm using 350D.. i can only meter as a whole.. no spot metering..
quite frustrating sometimes.. den muz switch frm Ap to full manual..

 

[Fluorite]

NEITHER!!! Exposure is a technical part of photography and must never be neglected. If you acccidentally expose wrongly, then too bad- adjust it. But try not to make such mistakes. Meter accurately using the appropriate meter depending on lighting eveness.

In this poll, I refer to underexposed as black shadows and overexposed as blown white highlights. Hence, they are both useless.

 

[obewan]

If a photograph comes out what you have in mind when you shoot,
then good for you. That means your skill is good.
If it doesn't, by all means use a photo editing tools to help you get the desire
results.
Of coz, try to expose properly in the first place la. Shoot like you are shooting film.
:bsmilie:

 

[freelancer]

If you are shooting in RAW, always expose to the right but do not blow the highlights. Blown highlights cannot be recovered but there is plenty of details you can recover quite well in the shadow areas.

 

[Germinc]

So the middle of the histogram is the midtones and the left the shadows the right the highlights?

 

[yanyewkay]

If you are shooting in RAW, always expose to the right but do not blow the highlights. Blown highlights cannot be recovered but there is plenty of details you can recover quite well in the shadow areas.

if you are shooting in RAW, you can recover blown hilights up to 1 or 1.5 stop over for most brands.
Canon RAW can recover up to 2 stop over exposure.
If you know how to use PS, with layers, levels and mask, you can recover roughly 1/3 to 2/3 stop over exposure in JPG.


Going for correct exposure will save you lots of time editing photos.

I used to heed the myth of under exposing in to preserve hilights, it gave me lots of work to correct the under to correct exposure, now i try to go for proper exposure everytime.

 

[freelancer]

Going for correct exposure will save you lots of time editing photos.

Going for the correct exposure is what we all should start of with. Sometimes however we do not have control over the lighting, for example clouds movements changes the exposure and RAW is useful as a method to recover stuff that is somewhat difficult or impossible with JPEGs. The other point is JPEG is 8 bits (or 256 tonal values) whereas RAW is 12 bits (4096) tonal values which means when RAW is converted to 16 bits TIFF, you have a lot more on the dynamic range to work with. With landscape I invariably shoot with RAW converted to two 16 bits TIFF, one over-exposed and the other under-exposed. With this technique in PS I can get a 7 f-stop shot as opposed to around 5 f-stop with JPEG. That is evident on what you can pull out of the RAW file.

Just to clarify, I am a strong believer of exposing to the right of the histogram but making sure I do not blow highlights unless its intentional

 

[yanyewkay]

:thumbsup: you sure know your tools well :thumbsup:

just to clarify also..

Going for correct exposure will save you lots of time editing photos.

this was meant for the thread starter sorry for the misunderstanding

 

[freelancer]

yanyewkay, glad to share. Yes, this was also meant for the original poster. I do not think there is a yes/no answer to overexposure or underexposure. A lot more considerations are involved

 

[trlnlty]

abit off topic here but i've been to nyc 3 times the past month and i've found it extremely difficult to shoot with tall buildings when im on the street.

Due to the harsh shadowds that the buildings create. so if i want detail on the building the sky will be horribly over-exposed..

how do you guys solve this problem ?

 

[Watcher]

abit off topic here but i've been to nyc 3 times the past month and i've found it extremely difficult to shoot with tall buildings when im on the street.

Due to the harsh shadowds that the buildings create. so if i want detail on the building the sky will be horribly over-exposed..

how do you guys solve this problem ?

Wah nice

Solution: Bracket and combine.

 

[trlnlty]

Wah nice

Solution: Bracket and combine.

yea i stay 4 hours from nyc its awesome..

what do you mean bracket??

 

[LittleWolf]

abit off topic here but i've been to nyc 3 times the past month and i've found it extremely difficult to shoot with tall buildings when im on the street.

Due to the harsh shadowds that the buildings create. so if i want detail on the building the sky will be horribly over-exposed..

how do you guys solve this problem ?

Expose for the highlights and bring the midtones out later, be it by dodging/burning or adjusting contrast/gamma/transfer curves.

The problem I have anywhere in the world (not just in NYC) is that if I meter for the midtones/shadows in a high-contrast scene, the highlights will be burned out. (This is to be expected, of course.) Also, I found "intelligent" matrix metering to be an unpredictable pain in the rear end. On my specific model of camera, I found I usually get good results (i.e. the highlights are just abotu to clip) by partially metering the highlights and applying +2EV of exposure compensation.