I don’t think jpeg clipping basis is that bad. I often use Uni W.B. If I put the jpeg settings in a known state in my Canon, I’ve found by experimenting that the histogram can go half way along the last division of the display and be ok (there are 5 divisions). I have the jpegs set to minimum contrast and saturation.
What is still tricky though is when the highlights are small in area but still quite important. The small camera display makes it hard to see how far the histogram really goes. I’ve never tried Magic Lantern.
The semantics of “spot meter” should preclude that… Even if they change the 18%, it should be relatively easy with a couple of shots of a grayscale target to characterize it.
Then, probably you should. While I rarely use AETTR (after reading this thread, I definitely will), the RAW EV ETTR hint is always on and I compensate for it in difficult situations.
I fully agree but … easier said than done.
I own m43 Lumix camera (gx9). Since I mostly shoot people I use center weighted metering. I have also activated zebra patter to warn about burned highlight in live preview. Aaaand I look at the histogram all the time. I know that it’s all JPEG base thus I have around 1EV margin most of the time, but that’s rough guess.
In darktable I frequently find that I was too conservative or went to far. It’s not so easy to get right metering for RAW processing in my camera.
I don’t mind burned highlights when I agree to them but what I can’t stand is the sharp/sudden transition.
As I recall there was a good reason not to have RAW (linear) histogram in camera: Most of the time data will reside in first 15% of the histogram while after applying the gamma the histogram will look as we expect it.
90% of the time I’d agree and I shoot for the highlights, however I’ve never really had results that made me happy out of the expose for the highlights method when it comes to back lighting. Despite better denoising in darktable and RawTherepee in later releases the pushed shadows always almost look awful compared to exposing for them in camera and just saying to heck with hightlights. Even the proprietary software packages don’t do a great job with it, or at least they didn’t 5-6 years ago when I last ran them. Indeed, sometimes it doesn’t work out and I’d say for the vast majority of photos you want to watch the right side of the histrogram. Examples of what I’m talking about from my own work.
Granted most of the time I’m using strobe to get the foreground a couple of stops up from the ambient exposure so there’s not as huge of a difference between the highlights and the subject. I’m sure the more technical photographers among you can probably tell me the 500 different ways those photos are bad, should be junked and I should donate my camera to someone who can put it to better use but I think they “look good” for a lack of a better term. Sorry I am my own harshest critic!
It was a different story when I did astronomy professionally, overexposure was a big no-no for data gathering.
But my image is being used in this thread as “look what this dumb !@#$$# did” bad example here so maybe don’t listen to me. Just felt the need to defend us no good, dumb, dirty, stinky backlighters here!
@lhutton There’s nothing wrong with clipping if you know what you’re getting and you’re achieving the artistic results you want. As long as you don’t expect the software to magically recover data for you. By not clipping the data you’re just giving yourself more options in post-production and avoiding any troublesome colour casts that the clipping creates.
@anon41087856’s new filmic module should go some way to getting you better results if you do expose to the right. Certainly darktable has moved on leaps and bounds since 5-6 years ago.
I figured some of this out on my own: that is (far) better to underexpose than over. But that doesn’t mean I’m smart. It took me too many years to get there.
I have an eyeball snorkel now so I can inspect my digital display in bright sunlight. And I watch my histograms. Constantly.
I think what you are talking about is typically called ETTR (Expose to the right), ie expose according to highlights.
The basic idea is fine, although the back-of-camera histogram can be deceiving because it is based on the camera jpg. More (much more) is available here: https://blog.kasson.com/using-in-caera-histograms-for-ettr/
(I copied & pasted the url, so the missing m is correct)
Otherwise, it can happen that you want the background to clip. Shooting at 5pm in winter in Lyon, there are lots of times when you are going to have way more than 14 bits worth of DR in front of you, and you’ll need to decide what you want. You might be shooting with a plain white background in studio, and you want the entire background to be paper-white: so whether all channels are at 255, or one or all is way over, you’re going to push them into clipping with the tone curve or similar. It doesn’t matter. You can easily have a super-bright reflection off a belt-buckle that doesn’t matter… or it might be off a belt-buckle just in front of the face of the subject and it does matter… but maybe then you need to mask it. Good luck.
For more exotic artistic reasons, you might want the main subject clipped… but yes, you should know what this is going to mean for processing. It will be easier if you are going to convert to B&W.
So here’s an example a) of where clipping is unavoidable if you want more than silhouettes; and b) when it’s deeply annoying bacause it’s small, but irregular, against a dark background and in a bad spot…
Pretty much standard with many cameras that have DRO options - underexpose by 1-2 stops and tonemap the shadows up in the SOOC JPEG. Since the raw image isn’t tonemapped, you see the original highlight-preserving underexposure.
There was recently some good discussion on DPReview on how to set Sonys up to have the in-camera highlight clipping warning be close to the RAW clipping threshold, I’ll try and dig that up.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t ETTR different to exposing for the highlights? When exposing for the highlights, you will often end up with an underexposed overall scene out of camera as the highlights should have the correct exposure. On the other hand, when exposing to the right, you are over-exposing as much as possible (without clipping) to capture as much data as possible to the right of the histogram, because digital sensors are better at capturing brighter details than dark details.
I agree. Exposing for the highlights is a bit of a vague term and I think different people mean different things when they say it. I suppose the one thing everyone agrees on is that exposing for the highlights means not clipping them, but apart from that the definition is a bit fluid. ETTR is much more specific.
BTW exposing-to-the-right is less to do with compensating for a property of the digital sensors and more to do with the properties of the light itself (shot noise). The more light you capture, the higher the signal-to-noise ratio and the more information you are capturing.
No, they’re chasing the same objective. In both, the object is to put the highlights right at or just under the sensor saturation point. For some scenes, that’s a +EV from the “standard” exposure, for others it’s a -EV.
ETTR is a special case of exposing for the highlights, as a square is to a rectangle. Moreoever, when you have specular or bright sources, you can’t do strict ETTR. The rest of your image would be woefully near the noise floor.
Sony cameras allow you to change the settings that you get an “hdr” histogram which isn’t based on the developed jpeg. Take a look at DRO and Creative style settings
@anon41087856 is right about Fujifilm cameras. At least some of their X series are know to underexpose by about 2/3 of a stop. It was evidenced in comparison shots on review sites such as dpreview, to compare Fuji cameras with other cameras they had to lower the shutter speed by 2/3 stops to get a similar brightness. It’s not a metering nor a DR thing. Take a shot at 1/125, f/11, iso 200 on a Fuji X, and same settings on a Sony or whatever, the Fuji will look less exposed.
The realization that slapped me in the face is that there really is no “correct” exposure. For a low-dynamic-range scene, you can “move” the raw data across the face of the sensor a few stops for a set of images, and when in post you anchor each’s highest value to white, they’ll all look pretty much the same.
It’s the middle gray reference to which most meters are anchored that determines how the rest of the data lays on the sensor. What’s the number I saw recently, about 2.4 stops from gray to saturation in most sensors, so any light that goes past that will just saturate the sensel. In Watership Down terms, the “hrair limit”…
A lot of the time, the data past the hrair limit is just specular, in-scene light sources. But sometimes, it’s brightly-lit objects; go see my “Afternoon Snack” PlayRaw for a good example. In those cases, one might want to underexpose from the camera’s assertion, pull those bright bits into resolution. But that will push shadows down toward black, and into the noise floor of the sensor, if they weren’t already there. Sometimes, the photographer is hungry, and wants to eat more than wanting to mess with the exposure…
Soooo… pick your poison, I guess. This is why I’ve bought each successive camera, chasing dynamic range, so when I pushed shadows further into the well, the sensor tolerated it a bit better…
While I rarely use AETTR (after reading this thread, I definitely will), the RAW EV ETTR hint is always on and I compensate for it in difficult situations.
Just felt the need to defend us no good, dumb, dirty, stinky backlighters here!
