Hi all,
I have noticed that my exposures are not especially correct.
At least one channel is more or less blown. I think that I know
the reason, though: before the X-T1, I owned a Cannon 600D,
and I was accustomed to exposing to the very right (a.k.a. ETTR).
If you own an X-T1, what is your experience regarding its exposure
recommendations and the result?
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
I own an X-T20 and usually shoot -1/3 to -2/3 EV.
Correct exposures mean nothing in digital. Setting exposure in camera is the same as setting the gain of a microphone : you want to increase it as much as possible to improve the SNR while keeping it under the clipping threshold.
The right exposure is the one that slides the dynamic range of your picture the best inside the dynamic range of your sensor. Which means you could have to pull/push the exposure in soft quite a lot to get your scene middle-grey back at your display middle-grey. It doesn’t matter.
And once the scene/display middle-grey are matched, filmic or else allow you to squeeze black and white back into the display dynamic range around the grey.
Thank you, Rei! Interesting reading.
But in this case I actually believe that it is I who have goofed…
FWIW, if you don’t want your Fuji to automatically underexpose to save highlights (with a DR setting — especially DR Auto), set DR to 100 and it’ll work as expected. And then just like all other digital cameras without auto dynamic range handling, you’ll lose highlights if you’re not careful.
If you don’t want auto highlight recovery, but do want to shoot to for the highlights, having a histogram you can trust is useful. For a Fuji camera, if you mainly just shoot and care about raw, I’ve seen that you can get a pretty decent histogram by setting your camera to:
Using the relatively neutral settings above makes very bland JPEGs (you can reprocess raw files in-camera by hitting Q and selecting other options if you want to quickly use a SooC JPEG that looks nicer). However, after setting the above, the histogram is much better than when using a film emulation.
So there’s a tradeoff.
If you don’t want to think about the technical aspect so much when shooting and/or want to shoot JPEG (or RAW+JPEG), then you can happily use DR Auto. You can still change settings and think about framing, and so on.
You’ll get useful raw files in darktable either way (as long as you don’t clip highlights) — especially with the linear rgb workflow, filmic rgb, and the improved denoising in darktable. That is: Even if you or your camera accidentally underexpose too much, between your Fuji and DT3, you can still get good images.
Hi @garrett and many thanks for your long & interesting reply!
you’ll lose highlights if you’re not careful.
That seems to be my major problem, i.e. clipped highlights.
If you don’t want to think about the technical aspect
Of course I do want to think about the tech aspects; they are my main interest, being a pixel peeper…
Will test your settings, thanks!
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
@garrett Yes! Your settings are much better than my old ones. Thank you!
(Even if my X-T1 cannot go lower than -2 for Sharpness and for Noise reduction.)
In the meantime I have also found this longer thread:
https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4265700
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
Interesting. I have that same camera body and I’m usually at +2/3 - +1.
I just got that same body and I’m still in the testing/experimentation stage. I’d be interested to hear how you each got to your respective settings.
I make sure my highlights in the jpeg are never clipped. I haven’t had the Fuji long, so there are tweaks to be had.
I use a similar (but different) strategy 
Based on the fact that the RAW has more recovery place than the jpeg, I expose until the highlights start to clip. At that point I know that I can overexpose 1 stop without blowing the highlights in the RAW.
Yes, you just need to find out your camera’s headroom for various ISO and then adjust accordingly. You don’t need RawDigger or any other paid app; just take a series of test shots and then examine the raw files using exiftool or exiv2.
I personally try to get it right in camera and don’t really edit anymore. but that’s just me.
When I’m in anything but full manual mode, I seem to get better exposed images by overexposing that much.