Proper Exposure is very debatable with a simple thought exercise. Imagine a green grass lawn, this would be your mid-tone. If there is a shadow over the lawn but the exposure is locked on the sunlit part, then you are going to get a much darker green in the image but is that exposure correct?
It would depend, if you had a person standing in the shade then you are probably going to want to open up and not expose to the right because the quality of light in the shadow is going to be poor, bluish (as the lawn in shadow is lit from the blue of the sky and not the sun), so the proper exposure is going to put the mid-tone of the sunlit grass higher on a histogram and risk blowing it out because otherwise you are going to be raising the shadows where you would have a lot of noise.
It gets funky, when you have two people on the lawn, one in the shade one in the light, then the correct exposure is probably going to be the original (a reflector/ fill-in flash would then be useful).
Take a black cat on a pile of coal, the final image is going to have a histogram where almost every tone is going to be humped to the left, but relying on a camera reading without exposure compensation is going to give a RAW where the histogram is humped in the middle.
The fundamental thing is that the photographer takes control, he/ she makes an active decision what they want in the final image and then exposes for that effect.
Actually, I think itâs directly related to the improved usuability of high ISO values: in both cases, how far you can amplify the signal is dependent on the S/N in the shadows (the lights usually take care of themselves).
So if, with the same raw developer, an old camera gives good results at ISO 800, and a new one can go to 6400 with the same perceived quality, youâd have a gain of about 3EV in the shadows (very rough estimation).
However, do not just compare results for in-camera jpegs, or developments done with different (versions of) a raw developer: that technology also evolved⌠And that probably accounts for part of the perceived gain.
You could of course use one or more neutral gray cards to get a less subjective anchor in your image. In that way, there is a âproperâ exposure for the selected gray card. But of course, as soon as you have different lighting situations within an image, there is no âone proper exposureâ possible.
I donât think that that method is very relevant for most amateur photography, although for professionals in certain areas it will be relevant (exact reproduction comes to mind).
A few weeks ago I opened this issue, requesting that a mode be added to the exposure module that allows you to select an area and specify where you want to place it on the brightness scale.
You seem to be bringing in artistic judgments, which arenât necessary.
If the dynamic range of your scene is less than that of your sensor, then you can ETTR. The premise of ETTR is that youâre not going to any clipping.
If you dont have clipping, then you donât need to assign the luminance value of âmid toneâ to the sun-lit grass, you can decide this during post.
If the dynamic range.of your scene exceeds the dynamic ranger of your sensor, and you have no.means to control that contrast, like a fill flash, then ETTR is not as applicable and you must select which values you want to record. In this scenario, you will need artistic judgments, as this will determine what detial you can render in post.
Do you have a grey card or an incident light meter? as both would vary in readings depending on whether they are in the shadow or the light, grey cards also vary depending on how they are tilted, even colour temp is subjective.
My POV is that one should know oneâs equipment and make a choice to expose for effect, or in Ansel Adamâs terms, expose to get the best negative possible to produce a print (digital or film), which is the same as shooting a portrait in shadow and exposing to blow the background out or shooting one in sunlit and blocking up the shadows behind the subject. Itâs also the same as Mr Adamâs choosing to show as much detail in a landscape as possible. Itâs all about the photographer choosing.
Not quite. If shooting in shadow but exposing for the highlights, in post one would be raising an image of person that would be blue and significantly more noisy than necessary. ETTR would give a poorer end result even though the RAW would have an even spread of tones across the histogram.
It only lets you vary exposure in stops, and while itâs not explicitly said, I believe it does that in the selected exposure mode (P,S,A). I wouldnât see the utility of varying ISO, as itâs the amount of light on the sensor that primarily influences noise and thatâs a function of exposure.
there are cases where an objective anchor in the image is needed;
having an area of known gray value can help in giving a basis for a defined exposure.
How to use that extra information is up to the photographer/editor.
And of course the reading on the gray card will vary depending on where in the scene it is. Thatâs why itâs used, to get a scene-defined value in the image. Again, how to use that is up to the photographer.
There are several factors in play here:
How do I expose the raw file to get optimal information: there you have to avoid clipping the important highlights, and where a middle gray zone ends up is not all that important.
How do I then edit that raw file to get an optimal rendition. There, a defined value in your scene gives you a known starting point.
Your exemple of a person in the shadow, in a scene exposed for the highlight is a bit of a red herring, as you are mixing two concepts: white balance and exposure. You can very well expose for the highlights with a whitebalance set to shadow. The more so as changing the camera white balance setting doesnât change the raw file (it will change the embedded jpeg, but who cares?).
And if you expose for the highlights in such a scene, one assumes those highlights are important, so you need to keep detail there.
And Mr Adams didnât have quite the same equipment as we have nowadays (which does not invalidate his words, but changes how to act on them).
Keep in mind, that when using accurate ETTR compared to a stronger under exposure, you get a larger exposure time, which in some situations can lead to more blur by motion of the camera or the subject
We do agree and in the context of this thread, proper exposure is subjective, which is my point, ETTR is not a fit all solution which your sentence
affirms by make a choice as to what is important. In the sunlit/ shadow scene mentioned as a thought exercise, the important highlights would change, the exposure for ETTR on the eyeballs of a person in shadow would blow the highlights of the sunlit areas and thatâs fine. Itâs probably not fine to ETTR (IMHO) on the whole scene and then pull the shadow areas up which would result in more noise and lower contrast on the person in the scene.
There is no correct exposure for the midtones, just like Mr Adamâs choosing to develop a neg for the most details in all areas by pulling (mainly) and getting a soft neg, itâs all a choice keeping final result in mind.
@Kofa could you simulate that now âŚthere is a picker in the exposure module to let you use an area for exposureâŚmaybe select that area see what ev you end up at and then add or subtract the amount of ev you need to get that to your desired set point âŚI am thinking off the top of my head and not sure that would be the number you desire but there is a picker in there so just thinking there might be a way to use it??
While I agree that proper exposure is subjective, Ansel Adamâs Zone System could be a way to make it objective. It can be done by measuring the luminance (L channel in either Lab or LCh) of different parts of the image (foliage, sky, skin, âŚ) with the color picker tool to make sure it lies in its supposed âzoneâ.
If youâre talking about the zone system, then there is absolutely a correct exposure, and a lot of other things that need to be correct in order to produce a film negative with the desired contrast.
Youâre mixing up a lot of theory here, film and digital donât work the same way.
In your original thought experiment, you didnât tell us if the scene dynamic range exceeds that of the camera, if the photographer wants to preserve as much detail as possible, if clipping is or isnât acceptable, thus its hard to complete this thought experiment and youâre getting a lot of answers.
I find it much simpler to drag the slider until I like what I see. The exposure picker can operate in two modes:
select an area and a percentage to blow out â not what I need
select an area and specify what percentile should have what exposure value (mid-grey is about -2.4 EV), but you canât average an area; you could try targeting the 50th percentile. I think this is rather awkward.
Itâs not a serious issue, I donât find adjusting exposure hard manually. I just thought that with a workflow centred around mid-grey itâd make sense to add support to set exposure based on mid-grey to the module.
circa 1996. A wager using a Nikon F2 with faulty photomic head from the paperâs junk cupboard. 14+ stops, Print developed to N-2.5, Fuji Neopan 400 pulled to 200 (N-1), Afga Rodinal (another -1), paper pre-flashed (-0.5).
circa 1997. Junk Cupboard handheld Hassleblad 500c/m (?), Ambient light, N development and printing, black hair extensions against a black background (bedsheet thrown over a door) highlight detail in the face.
A 2017 example of where ETTR would fail as the accordion player was in the shade, the skin tones would have had to be raised and would be noisy, so the exposure was set by touch to blow the highlights on a 10+ stop scene. Exif data should be intact.
Okay, First shot of Balloons taken 20+ years ago, with the exception of this yearâs sensors probably outside the dynamic range of digital, so then one is looking at bracketed exposures for HDR which would have motion blur. ETTR therefore not really applicable, though it could be argued that for the lightest tones bracketed it is. I strongly suspect that lab tested dynamic range for the darkest tones visible would not translate well in real world dynamic range in low light without substantial noise in the darker tones.
Second shot of the woman, ETTR would be applicable if the percentage of highlight tones was visible on the in camera histogram, but I would sway towards ETTL to make sure the dark tones were kept and no lifting was required or run the risk of chromatic noise.
The third photo is an example of ignoring ETTR for effect.
Camera meters are great, 90% of the time they work and give a OOC Jpg that people are content with, ETTR works on RAW 99% of the time. I fully admit that these are edge cases, but as a former regional news photographer that had to do 10 jobs a day in whatever the weather conditions and time of day (no luxury of the golden hour), the edge cases came up a lot more of the time.
Having to use Velvia with only 4~5 stops of range made choosing the amount of highlight detail and discarding other tones, second nature. My general advice is to take lots of pictures, until one is actively immersed in the subjective and more into visualisation of the finished print, itâs too easy to get bogged down in getting a full range of tones in the RAW only to end up dodging out and burning in details that would otherwise distract from the main subject matter.
