That’s not calculating clipping of the raw sensor values though.
No but the setting could affect what Bill was doing in his process noted above when he was trying to compare I would suspect
I said clipping when I originally wrote it, but I meant raw overexposure.
Yes, and none of them will match RawDigger for all colors, because the working space color channels are a combination of all the raw color channels.
The issue with “shooting under really bad lighting” is a symptom of this.
I’ll make another post tomorrow with pictures that will hopefully explain it better.
Does ETTR Metering in camera make sense in metering modes other than spot metering?
Matrix metering, the way I understand it, weighs the measurement based on a manufacturer’s internal database. As an extreme example, the camera guesses whether the scene is a sunset or an evenly lit scene and biases the output for that.
Center metering, I am not so sure. But the idea of ETTR is to find the brightest relevant point in the szene and measure (and manually compensate) for that. Center metering might already be too large and take to much darker area into the reading.
Just from a practical point of view, for plenty of what I take pictures of, spot metering is not an option. Too much movement, too many changes in lighting.
Looking at it from that direction, I have my camera setup for a neutral picture style (not even reducing contrast and saturation) and try to get a proper exposure that way. This way I theoretically might get a little worse signal to noise in comparison to a successful ETTR but I keep good margins to the extreme points.
The larger exposure lift I need to perform in a filmic workflow would have been compensated by the base curve (brightening up the picture) in the “old” workflow?
That can be at least part of the reason (just look at various basecurve presets), but the exact influence depends on which basecurve is applied, and thus (probably) on which camera brand you use. I know that for Sony, I could add at least 1 EV exposure relative to the basecurve. That was also the reason I usually switched to another basecurve to get a rendition more to my liking.
ETTR should evaluate the entire frame equally, so it would be its own metering mode rather than center-weighted, spot, or whatever “evaluative/matrix/etc” that aims for middle gray.
I’ve been working hard the Z 6’s Highlight-Weighted Matrix mode, which is separate and distinct from their Matrix mode. It can definitely blow highlights in some cases, mostly from my observation when the scene includes light sources, but it does a good job of not blowing anything else. It does so at the expense of a stop or so of headroom, mostly, but the camera’s sensor in the depths of the shadow pit does quite well in allowing some curve to yank them into presentability.
My ‘ETTR’ technique of late is to bracket, if the scene will stay still for it. Otherwise, on-the-go I’m relying on this mode and post-process lifting, and I’m satisfied with the results. I don’t think I’d buy another camera that doesn’t have such a metering mode. Not that I wouldn’t enthusiastically embrace a proper ETTR mode… 
The measuring method doesn’t matter: you just need to avoid clipping. It doesn’t help to measure just the brightest spot since the camera evaluates this as mid grey - then you need to know, how much you can increase exposure until there’s clipping in the raw.
Unless there’s a raw histogram or zebra indicating clipping based on sensor output its up to your experience…
To complicate things a little more, in my case I use ‘back-button focus’ exclusively, I just got hooked to it many years ago. Meaning “focus in the center, recompose, meter/adjust and shoot”. That’s one reason I’ve been using matrix metering forever - metering before composing did not sound reasonable, but I guess I’ll have to try it and see what happens.
I’ll also try @paperdigits recco, perhaps setting +2EV overexposure permanently during a few sessions. Taking a look at recent and old raw histograms going back a few years, they all seem to have 2-3 or more EVs of headroom.
I will also use bracketing harder while testing this, that’s a great idea. I have been using 3-frame / 0.5 or 0.7EV bracketing more for “fine tuning” exposure. I’ll try 5 or 7 if the scene allows. It’s free anyways 
I wonder why Nikon & Canon do not add ETTR exposure mode. It seems like there is a demand for this
Probably because it’s a lot less useful for jpeg shooting, and it sounds like it’s rather hard to get correct (especially in the higher ISO settings).
And how many users really care about such a mode (as a proportion of the total userbase for those cameras)?
I’d highly recommend using the HDRMerge darktable plugin when bracketing - it will align and merge your bracketed RAW files into a DNG that is auto-imported into darktable. This way you can just process the resulting DNG as you normally would. As long as you have a scene that lends itself to bracketing, this is really powerful
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Looks like I’m gonna have to bust out my Zone VI digital spotmeter again.
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That is why I put in parentheses to manually compensate for that. That is what I meant. My apologies…lost in translation.
… bust out my Zone VI digital spotmeter…
It just hit me: in these Android App days — might there
be something of use in the App store?
More info here: 8 Best Light Meter Apps in 2024
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
I have a Sony A7 III. So what I tell is about this camera.
The default settings in the camera are for exposing an in-camera JPG (a devleoped photo). The same applies for the live histogram. However some cameras, like mine, allow you to change those settings and the histogram. I do that for landscape photographs, the reason is that I want to get out as much as possible from the dynamic range and expose that I don’t clip highlights.
You can find my landscape settings here:
I think some Nikon cameras have an ETTR exposure mode, as does my Sony. A couple of points though:
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in some cases it may be preferable to blow some specular highlights in order to reduce noise in the shadows, otherwise you might end up with some images with low exposure. Exposure compenation with zebras can be useful here.
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The default settings in exposure module and filmic assume the image was exposed using matrix metering, and adjusted fir ETTR using manual compensation dial. If the camera automatically exposes for ETTR, the exposure module no longer knows what the camera would have estimated to be middle grey, and it cannot correct for the ETTR adjustment. This means that there may be more variability in exposure between different shots, and you may need to adjust the exposure slider more often to set the middle grey point, whereas if you use matrix metering, then on many cases the amount of tweaking needed on the exposure slider will be less.
My workflow is a bit different. I use “zebra” or “highlight” indication showing me (before taking a photo) which part of the image is overexposed in jpg. After doing some trials I found that when jpg overexposed indication starts to appear I can still add 2/3 EV and recover the highlights in raw.
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