Photographers: stop clipping your highlights

[anon41087856]

@ggbutcher

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.

Yeah, it’s pretty much like setting up the gain for a microphone: increase it as much as possible to optimize the PSNR, but keep it -3 dB under clipping. Every anchor number such as grey = 18% or white = 100% = log2(grey) + 2.43 EV is merely conventional, and useful only if no post-processing is performed.