ETTR: Is it still a thing for you?

• There is no advantage to image quality from ETTR that can't be duplicated by selecting a lower ISO, if a lower ISO setting is available. In some situations, such as where there is in-camera noise reduction, ETTR actually increases noise. That's what the practical tests show, and the theory of the case confirms the practical results to be correct.

• The only situation where there is an advantage to ETTR is if you're already at the lowest ISO setting your camera, and you use ETTR to synthesize a lower ISO. However, given the noise performance of most modern cameras, that advantage is often very small. The test I did here - a small sensor high pixel count camera - is the best possible scenario for seeing an improvement. Using a modern DSLR, the improvement would be marginal at best.

• Any kind of ETTR brings significant disadvantages in the shape of color and tone curve shifts that will have to be repaired in post processing. While these shifts are small, they are easily the equivalent in effect of changing profiles. So, in effect, ETTR negates the advantages that modern raw developers such as Lightroom bring with them.

• "...there isanother situation in which ETTR will benefit you in addition to the ones I laid out in the previous posts. That situation is the one in which the read noise (the noise from the camera electronics rather than the sensor) is a significant portion of the image noise. The question, of course, is does that happen in practice?"

I get where he is going with the last one, because the D7000 and newer generation of Sony sensor's have exceptionally low read noise.

So I was just thinking about all of the times over the years that I've actually used ETTR, and I must say, for the most part I realized that I don't use it much at all. Histograms aren't neat little bundles, and you don't always have room to shift the exposure further to the right before clipping highlights. Just going back through the years, I think the situation that I have used it the most was at base ISO, and where the contrast wasn't relatively flat... I've gotten excellent images shooting in the fog with ETTR because the histogram tends to clump narrowly around middle grey if you leave the camera to its own devices. Also with landscapes, because I tend tend to those around the golden hour or just after dusk. But other that, it's not something that's been at the forefront of my mind, especially with people shooting. Thoughts?