calirat, post: 61476825, member: 1845234"]
I find that highlights are often clipped or lost with today's MF sensors, but shadows have a ton of detail even when they look completely dark.
I try to underexpose a little these days for this reason.
If you are getting clipped meaningful highlights in your raw files, you are not using an effective exposure strategy. What is your strategy?
I shoot and look at the histograms and try for a U shape. Is that a strategy?
I am trying to expose so that the highlights don't get clipped but it's a work in progress, and the result is that I am shooting a bit dark which seems to work.
What camera are you using? I'll assume a GFX, but if you're using something different, let me know. When you see a histogram with no clipping in the GFX live color histogram, does the shot exhibit clipping when you look at the four raw channels? If so, there are some possible reasons for that, but I'll wait to go into them until I know if that's indeed the case for you.
Jim
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http://blog.kasson.com
645z. Thank you. Much appreciate any suggestions Jim.
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I'm not Jim but I own the 645z as well as the GFX. And, you've heard of Michael Reichmann of Luminous Landscape? In his review of the 645z, he makes some interesting statements regarding exposure and the histogram/blinkies which have born out in my own experience with the 645z i.e. keep doing what I think you are doing with the 645z.
https://luminous-landscape.com/pentax-645z-in-depth-review/
Excerpt:
Highlight Warning Disagreement
I will assume that most people interested in an advanced medium format camera understand the principal of ETTR (or Expose to The Right), which is a concept I first wrote about in the early days of digital – following an in depth explanation by Thomas Knoll, one of the inventors of Photoshop and also Camera Raw.
ETTR isn’t anywhere as critical today as it was ten or more years ago. Cameras have much more dynamic range and cleaner shadows. But, the so-called 255 brick wall is still there, where the pixel buckets overflow and all detail is lost if too many photons enter the well.
But using ETTR technique is still a very good shooting discipline and can gain you one or two stops of headroom in a shot, and thus up to an extra two stops of DR and cleaner shadow detail in a wide dynamic range situation.
The Pentax 645z has two primary means of showing you the appropriateness of either its selected exposure, or the one that you manually choose. The first is a histogram and the second is highlight blinking. This is available both while shooting (if in Live View) and also in exposure review.
Here’s the problem. As with almost all cameras the playback histogram and blinkies are based on an in-camera JPG representation of the image, and the colour space that that camera is set to. If you’re set to sRGB you may as well go home and watch TV, because the histogram will bear little useful relationship to the raw image. The sRGB colour space is so much smaller than the colour gamut of the camera that you’ll see highlights shown as blown when you still have two stops of headroom.
If the camera is set to Adobe RBG then you’re somewhat better off. Adobe RGB is a larger colour space than sRGB, but still vastly smaller than the camera’s colour gamut. So, in a word or two, the playback histogram is fairly useless at indicating overexposure, and if you follow it you will be wasting headroom, and thus have shadow areas that are much noisier than they might be otherwise.
Fortunately the 645z has real-time highlight warning blinkies in Live View mode, and this is taken directly from the sensor. In other words, if something blinks red in Live View it’s blown. If it doesn’t, it isn’t. When displayed along with the histogram in Live View (which also has a red line to the right when anything is blown), you will be able to make technically optimum exposures. (Some experiments have shown that the camera’s real-time indication of “blown” coincides almost exactly with that of the histograms in Lightroom or Rawdigger.
I wish though that instead of red blinkies the 645z had adjustable level zebras. They are a more useful and contemporary tool. But more to the point, I would suggest to Pentax that the camera’s raw colour space be added alongside sRGB and Adobe RGB for those of us (most of us?) who shoot raw. That way review histograms and blinkies will be more accurate.
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Once you've done fifty, anything less is iffy.
