Underexposure: How to do it right?

I wish to get better at taking darker underexposed images but have been struggling pretty bad so far. Mine always look underexposed in a technically bad way, like I made a mistake. Can anybody share some of your best advice on underexposing images for a certain "flat-ish" look and making it look deliberate and good? I'm also curious if y'all know or are able to guess what approx settings the below image samples have been taken with?

I like a lot of New York Times foreign coverage photos, particularly from Eastern Europe and Russia. One of their main guys is/was Emile Ducke, and he tends to underexpose his pictures, making them look more dramatic and letting the colors pop in the dark.





And below is another example I just found recently.

This one has a ton of post-processing, but all the Lightroom stuff aside, what settings do you think these below images were taken with?

The trick is to find appropriate subject material with generally the desired tonal relationships. Subsequent PP then can refine.

Underexposed is by definition too dark. You can do low key photos which are supposed to be dark, but of the image brightness matches the desired result it's not under exposed

It's not a matter of underexposure, as others have explained. It's the balance of darks and shadows to brights and highlights, and results mostly from composition and lighting. Just cranking down the EV won't do it alone.

One thing that can help is setting up for spot metering and meter on the very bright spot in the image; it's there's a lot of contrast and range that will often get you part way there. Like maybe the sky or a bright patch in those images. But that's a proper exposure, not an underexposure.

Truefolder said:

I wish to get better at taking darker underexposed images but have been struggling pretty bad so far. Mine always look underexposed in a technically bad way, like I made a mistake. Can anybody share some of your best advice on underexposing images for a certain "flat-ish" look and making it look deliberate and good? I'm also curious if y'all know or are able to guess what approx settings the below image samples have been taken with?

I like a lot of New York Times foreign coverage photos, particularly from Eastern Europe and Russia. One of their main guys is/was Emile Ducke, and he tends to underexpose his pictures, making them look more dramatic and letting the colors pop in the dark.

...

Click to expand...

Do not confuse a "dark looking image" with "under exposure".

Exposure has to do with the light reaching the sensor. This is generally independent for how dark or light an image looks.

As a general rule the lower the exposure, the noisier the image. If you want a low noise image, you generally want the maximum practical exposure. Choose the widest aperture that yields sufficient depth of field and the longest shutter that doesn't give unwanted motion blur. You can then adjust the ISO setting to darken or lighten the image.

.

My suggestion is that you shoot raw, and use Auto-ISO. This will get you a reasonable looking camera produced JPEG. Not too dark, and not too light. You can then adjust how dark or light the image looks when you process the raw data. When processing, you can control how the colors "pop", the overall color palette of the image, and even adjust tone curves to your liking. You will have far more control over the image than if you limited yourself to the options offered by in-camera raw processing.

.

This is how it was done back in the days of film.

With film, exposure determined how dense the negative was, not how dark.light the print looked. If the negative was too dense or too thin, the tonal response curve was off, and that hurt image quality.

How dark or light the print looked, had nothing to do with negative density, it was determined when you printed the negative. You could make a dark print, a light print, or a normal print from an underexposed negative (however the prints from the properly exposed negative usually looked better).

It's mostly po postprocessing, exposure down, whites up, black point up a little bit plus split toning for this cinematic look.

Truefolder said:

I wish to get better at taking darker underexposed images but have been struggling pretty bad so far. Mine always look underexposed in a technically bad way, like I made a mistake. Can anybody share some of your best advice on underexposing images for a certain "flat-ish" look and making it look deliberate and good? I'm also curious if y'all know or are able to guess what approx settings the below image samples have been taken with?

I like a lot of New York Times foreign coverage photos, particularly from Eastern Europe and Russia. One of their main guys is/was Emile Ducke, and he tends to underexpose his pictures, making them look more dramatic and letting the colors pop in the dark.





And below is another example I just found recently.

This one has a ton of post-processing, but all the Lightroom stuff aside, what settings do you think these below images were taken with?

Click to expand...

--

Truefolder said:

I wish to get better at taking darker underexposed images but have been struggling pretty bad so far. Mine always look underexposed in a technically bad way, like I made a mistake. Can anybody share some of your best advice on underexposing images for a certain "flat-ish" look and making it look deliberate and good? I'm also curious if y'all know or are able to guess what approx settings the below image samples have been taken with?

I like a lot of New York Times foreign coverage photos, particularly from Eastern Europe and Russia. One of their main guys is/was Emile Ducke, and he tends to underexpose his pictures, making them look more dramatic and letting the colors pop in the dark.

Click to expand...

Today's New York Times Russia-Ukraine War photos section has a lot of images by Mauricio Lam.

I've noticed this style since the war began. The luminosity histograms of the photos all look something like this:



There's a complete lack of the brightest tones and the darkest tones gradually roll off to black. Just underexposing a photo will just slam all the darkest tones to the far left of the histogram.

You can simulate this style in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) by taking a normally exposed photo. In ACR, set the Blacks slider to +100% and the Whites slider to -100%. Then reduce the Exposure slider to taste. Using the Highlights, Shadows, and Contrast sliders can help to further shape the histogram. Reducing Saturation helps sometimes too.

Here's a photo I took years ago of a burned-out riding lawnmower. I applied this style just this morning. I don't know if this is exactly what Mauricio Lam (or his editors) are doing but it's very effective. Try it with a photo that doesn't display destruction and/or despair and it just doesn't work:



--
Lance H

Michael Fryd said:

As a general rule the lower the exposure, the noisier the image.

Click to expand...

Not necessarily if it's also printed dark. And noise is not the problem in this case.

As a technical note, it's worth noticing that reducing exposure actually reduces noise, but also reduces S/N. This has important implications for the dark parts of the image (which in the OP's case is almost all of the image).

ThrillaMozilla said:

Michael Fryd said:

As a general rule the lower the exposure, the noisier the image.

Click to expand...

Not necessarily if it's also printed dark. And noise is not the problem in this case.

As a technical note, it's worth noticing that reducing exposure actually reduces noise, but also reduces S/N. This has important implications for the dark parts of the image (which in the OP's case is almost all of the image).

Click to expand...

Sorry, i was using the term "noise" to refer to signal to noise ratio. That's almost always what people on these forums are concerned about.

You are correct that from the technical viewpoint increasing exposure increases both noise and signal. However it increases signal more than it increases noise, and thus increases the signal to noise ratio.

By increasing exposure, you generally increase the useful dynamic range. This increases latitude to adjust the tone curve while maintaining quality.

Increasing exposure is a good idea, even if you want the final image to look dark.

lehill said:

I've noticed this style since the war began. The luminosity histograms of the photos all look something like this:

Click to expand...

I have a lot of pictures like that from a recent trip taken in bad weather. Many of them have contrast that is just too low. It can be quite a struggle to know what to do with them. Reset the white point to increase the contrast and brighten the whole image? Make it look like it was taken in good light? Or what?

My most successful ones were if there was a bright sky with some fog or clouds. The sky could be bright, with the white point set appropriately, and the rest of it just left dark. This might help the OP's photos, since they do have sky. This is not difficult if there is adequate contrast in the dark parts, but it can be a trick to control contrast in sky and dark parts independently.

I have one jpeg that was taken through glass, so there is some light added from a reflection. I wanted to reduce the light to remove the reflection, but in this case the tonality was just not there -- I think because of digitization error -- there are only 256 tonal values -- and it was hopeless. Maybe raw would have helped, maybe not. (This paragraph is probably extraneous to the OP's problem.)

ThrillaMozilla said:

lehill said:

...

Click to expand...

I have one jpeg that was taken through glass, so there is some light added from a reflection. I wanted to reduce the light to remove the reflection, but in this case the tonality was just not there -- I think because of digitization error -- there are only 256 tonal values -- and it was hopeless. Maybe raw would have helped, maybe not. (This paragraph is probably extraneous to the OP's problem.)

Click to expand...

Raw would have almost certainly given you more than 256 tonal values to work with. That would have made it easier to fix the image. Whether or not that would have been enough is a separate question.

petrochemist said:

Underexposed is by definition too dark.

Click to expand...

No, it is not, Underexposed is by definition not having received enough light. This may or may not result in an image that is too dark, depending on the ISO setting.

If I shoot a stationary subject in full sun with a 50mm lens at {1/2,000, f/8, ISO 1,600}, the result will be both two stops underexposed and two stops too light.

petrochemist said:

You can do low key photos which are supposed to be dark, but of the image brightness matches the desired result it's not under exposed

Click to expand...

"Underexposed" doesn't actually mean "too dark" - although a large number of people misuse the term in this way.. It means not enough light hit the sensor. "Too dark" is a possible, but nor necessary, result of underexposure.

Truefolder said:

I wish to get better at taking darker underexposed images

Click to expand...

Do you want darker images or do you want underexposed images? I'd suggest trying for the former while trying to avoid the latter.

Darker images and underexposed images are two different things. A darker image isn't necessarily underexposed and an underexposed image isn't necessarily dark.

The proverbial photo of a black cat in a coal mine is a dark image, but if it is taken using ETTR techniques, it will not be underexposed.

Using "underexposed" as a synonym for "too dark" was a lazy misuse of terminology that sprang up during the roll film era, when exposure (the amount of light falling on the sensor per unit area) had a 1:1 mapping to how light or dark a developed image was ("image lightness") under standard development. "Exposure" isn't how light or dark an image looks. It is the amount of light that fell on the sensor per unit area while the shutter was open.

There are at least two problems with continuing this misuse of terminology with digital cameras:

1. There is no such 1:1 mapping between exposure and image lightness with digital cameras, because you can adjust the ISO setting independently of the exposure.
2. More importantly, misapplying the term may obscure the solution to a problem.

# 2 is relevant to you because you need to concentrate on the images being dark, not on under-exposing them.

Truefolder said:

but have been struggling pretty bad so far. Mine always look underexposed in a technically bad way, like I made a mistake.

Click to expand...

Perhaps you tried to underexpose when all you had to was darken.

What were the symptoms of this "technically bad way"? How are these symptoms missing in the photos you like?

Generally, one does not want to reduce exposure, because reducing exposure increases noisiness. If possible, look for a way to reduce image lightness without reducing exposure. However, if one can make a photo with proper lightness (lighter than you want for this effect) at base ISO, reducing the exposure a stop won't hurt too much.

Truefolder said:

Can anybody share some of your best advice on underexposing images for a certain "flat-ish" look and making it look deliberate and good? I'm also curious if y'all know or are able to guess what approx settings the below image samples have been taken with?

Click to expand...

There are several different ways to achieve this effect, and not all of them rely on different camera settings.

1. Take a normal, technically good photo, and reduce its lightness in software after capture. In Lightroom, one might use the "exposure" slider to do this, even though Lightroom cannot possibly affect the exposure. The exposure was fixed at the moment the image was captured.
2. Use Auto-ISO and set Exposure Compensation to -1. This will only reduce the exposure if the camera is able to get a properly-light photo at base ISO. Otherwise it will only reduce image lightness. As an augmentation, consider dialing down saturation if shooting JPEG.
3. If you insist on setting ISO manually, to a value higher than base, manually set ISO one stop lower, while retaining the same aperture and shutter.

Truefolder said:

I like a lot of New York Times foreign coverage photos, particularly from Eastern Europe and Russia. One of their main guys is/was Emile Ducke, and he tends to underexpose his pictures, making them look more dramatic and letting the colors pop in the dark.

Click to expand...

If this effect is SOOC, then he probably just used negative exposure compensation.

Truefolder said:

Click to expand...

What makes you think this is darker than the scene actually was? Look at that heavy overcast. Look at how little shadow the ladder is casting. From a technical point of view, this photo may well be underexposed, but it may not be any darker than the scene actually was.

What the first two photos have in common is a lot of grey, and not many instances of other colours except green plants. The blue on the house is popping in part because it is the only non-vegetation colour in the frame.

Truefolder said:

And below is another example I just found recently.

This one has a ton of post-processing, but all the Lightroom stuff aside, what settings do you think these below images were taken with?

Click to expand...

Given the degree of post-processing, I'm not sure the camera settings are all that relevant. The metering might be of the greatest interest.

Truefolder said:

Click to expand...

FingerPainter said:

Truefolder said:

I wish to get better at taking darker underexposed images

Click to expand...

...

Using "underexposed" as a synonym for "too dark" was a lazy misuse of terminology that sprang up during the roll film era, when exposure (the amount of light falling on the sensor per unit area) had a 1:1 mapping to how light or dark a developed image was ("image lightness") under standard development. "Exposure" isn't how light or dark an image looks. It is the amount of light that fell on the sensor per unit area while the shutter was open.

...

Click to expand...

In the film era over/under exposure only meant too bright/dark when shooting transparencies. if you were shooting negative film, over/under exposure meant that the negative was too dense/thin.

How dark or light the print looked was independent of this. In the vast majority of cases you could shoot two frames of the same subject, with the second a stop higher in exposure than the other. When you got the prints back the two would have the same image lightness, as a person or machine would have adjusted for the exposure.

With film, if you wanted a light or dark print, you needed to make sure the person doing the printing knew what you wanted.

Thank you for posting those and telling us about the work of Emile Ducke. It's quite interesting, and I found more of his work here. It comes at an excellent time for me, so thank you again.

There are three main technical points that have been made.

1. There is a distinction between being underexposed and being dark. That's important, and I think you misunderstood that point. Photos are underexposed if the prints show excessive noise. Pictures are especially vulnerable to this if they have too little exposure and then are brightened in processing. Nevertheless, in my opinion your pictures are not underexposed.

2. Recording a raw file in the camera gives you more flexibility than a jpeg in the final appearance of the file, after editing. This sometimes makes a significant difference, but not always.

3. It is probably possible to give your photos more exposure. It may have been feasible to give them the maximum possible exposure, at the minimum ISO setting. This is called "exposing to the right". This guarantees the least possible image noise.

However, I'm not sure that the problem with your photos is technical, and I think the criticisms mostly miss the mark. You don't say what you think the problem is with your photos. Perhaps it is something as simple as not being taken by Emile Ducke.

Ducke's photos generally do not make use of the whole range of tonal values. They are characterized by relatively low contrast and little use of bright areas, except possibly for light sources in the image. They are generally taken in darkness--either under heavily overcast skies, dim indoor lighting, or at night. Even the sky, when present, is in the region of middle gray. But you have done that.

If we exclude noise, sharpness, depth of field, contrast and tonal range, that leaves composition, unless I missed something. Ducke's photos are compositionally fairly simple: they consist of subject and context. But you have done that too.

In fact, it's hard for me to fault the picture of the house. The picture of the swing is a little messy, but that's the whole point of the picture, so there's no criticism there. If it were mine, I would burn some of the brighter areas, namely the bright spots on the frame of the swing and on the ground below.

Since other replies have drawn a blank in my opinion. I think maybe it's your turn. What do you find inadequate by comparison with Ducke's photos?

Truefolder said:

I wish to get better at taking darker underexposed images but have been struggling pretty bad so far. Mine always look underexposed in a technically bad way, like I made a mistake. Can anybody share some of your best advice on underexposing images for a certain "flat-ish" look and making it look deliberate and good? I'm also curious if y'all know or are able to guess what approx settings the below image samples have been taken with?

I like a lot of New York Times foreign coverage photos, particularly from Eastern Europe and Russia. One of their main guys is/was Emile Ducke, and he tends to underexpose his pictures, making them look more dramatic and letting the colors pop in the dark.





And below is another example I just found recently.

This one has a ton of post-processing, but all the Lightroom stuff aside, what settings do you think these below images were taken with?

Click to expand...

The technique you are seeking to master is called low key photography. A low key image is one that contains predominantly dark tones and colours. It is not normally achieved by underexposure but rather by lighting and subject matter.

Have a look at THIS LINK to get a better understanding of the subject.

--
When the fun stops, stop.

alfn said:

The technique you are seeking to master is called low key photography. A low key image is one that contains predominantly dark tones and colours. It is not normally achieved by underexposure but rather by lighting and subject matter.

Have a look at THIS LINK to get a better understanding of the subject.

Click to expand...

That's fundamentally different from Ducke's photos.

ThrillaMozilla said:

alfn said:

The technique you are seeking to master is called low key photography. A low key image is one that contains predominantly dark tones and colours. It is not normally achieved by underexposure but rather by lighting and subject matter.

Have a look at THIS LINK to get a better understanding of the subject.

Click to expand...

That's fundamentally different from Ducke's photos.

Click to expand...

Nonsense. Ducke uses a wide range of styles and techniques including, very frequently, low key effects. Try THIS as a random example. Or how about THIS?

--
When the fun stops, stop.

You have already been corrected several times, about the language, but beyond not being a correct use of the word "underexposure", it gives the idea that you are trying to change the mood by exposure compensation.

Exposure compensation will make everything darker (in this instance) in more or less the same proportion. This is unlikely to get you where you want. The tool that will give you the control you need is most likely the curve on just about any editor. If you apply curves on raw images you can have the best leeway to modify the image without much penalty in image quality. You can start by darkening the highlights until you get the dark palette you want, and lightening the shadows a bit. This will give you reduced contrast and that may be what you want to avoid. By giving the curve a bit of an "S" shape you will regain contrast in the middle range (take note, the gradient on the curve is the contrast adjustment you are applying) and recover some impact. This is just a suggestion, and you should play around and hopefully read about grading or color grading a picture.

Hope this helps

alfn said:

ThrillaMozilla said:

alfn said:

The technique you are seeking to master is called low key photography. A low key image is one that contains predominantly dark tones and colours. It is not normally achieved by underexposure but rather by lighting and subject matter.

Have a look at THIS LINK to get a better understanding of the subject.

Click to expand...

That's fundamentally different from Ducke's photos.

Click to expand...

Nonsense. Ducke uses a wide range of styles and techniques including, very frequently, low key effects. Try THIS as a random example. Or how about THIS?

Click to expand...

According to THIS LINK from your post, "The only rule you should follow when shooting low key is to never allow light to reach your background." That is not characteristic of most of Ducke's photos here, and it is not characteristic of the OP's photos. There are other differences as well.