Is it better to over or to under-expose

[FafBill]

Decades ago, I shot Black & White film. Recently, I have started shooting color with a digital camera that looks like my old 35mm camera. In the old days, if I was uncertain of the best exposure, I would bracket either the time or the f-shop. As a roll of B & W film was limited in the number of shots it would take, I would just pick 2 shots rather than 3. I think it was better to shoot once at the exposure the camera's meter recommended and the other, one stop above, to overexpose. I had a friend who was a professional and I think that he recommended a small overexposure rather than a small underexposure. This was some time ago.

Maybe I should just rephrase this. If one is slightly uncertain of the best approximate exposure should one, over or under, expose.

 

[FrancoD]

Generally it is easier to compensate in PP for underexposure than overexposure.

Do keep in mind that people like you and me and generally photographers worldwide will understand the above but here some will be able to twist the accepted meanning of words to the point that neither you or I will have a clue of what they mean.

 

[FingerPainter]

Underexposing* will always result in a noisier image.

Overexposing* will sometimes result in unrecoverably blown highlights.

So, I'd suggest that if you can't meter for the highlights, but here are highlights in the scene whose detail you really want to preserve, underexpose. Otherwise, overexpose.

(*as you are using the terms)

 

[FrancoD]

Come to think of it, on my bird shots if the exposure is out more than a stop or so I am more likely to still get something when starting from an overexposed photo, but not always. Hence, I suppose, the conflicting opinions if one does Google that.

 

[John Deerfield]

Negative film had a lot more latitude in the shadows than a digital sensor. And a lot less latitude in the highlights than a digital sensor. The general rule of for film was to underexpose and bring up the shadows in post.

With digital, it all depends. Are you shooting raw or JPEG. If you are shooting JPEG, then the general rule is to underexpose because if you lose the highlights in a JPEG, these highlights are simply lost, unrecoverable. If you are shooting raw, the general rule is to overexpose the image to get more light (more exposure) into the shadows. The raw file typical has some decent latitude in recovering highlights. However, the same thing applies to the raw file: if the highlights are what I might say "blown-blown" there is no detail to recover. If you are a raw shooter, you might want to Google "exposing to the right" for some insight (pros & cons) into the technique.

 

[D Cox]

Decades ago, I shot Black & White film. Recently, I have started shooting color with a digital camera that looks like my old 35mm camera. In the old days, if I was uncertain of the best exposure, I would bracket either the time or the f-shop. As a roll of B & W film was limited in the number of shots it would take, I would just pick 2 shots rather than 3. I think it was better to shoot once at the exposure the camera's meter recommended and the other, one stop above, to overexpose. I had a friend who was a professional and I think that he recommended a small overexposure rather than a small underexposure. This was some time ago.

Maybe I should just rephrase this. If one is slightly uncertain of the best approximate exposure should one, over or under, expose.

Negative films are better over-exposed. Slide films (positive) are better underexposed.

(Of course, perfect exposure is best.)

Digital sensors are like slide films, not like negative films. When bracketing, you should do a correct exposure and an under-exposure. You can take more than two, of course, and most cameras today have an Auto Bracketing option to do this for you -- this can be very useful in difficult light.

There are also software methods to combine the best-exposed parts of three or even more exposures, so the shadows might be taken from one exposure and the highlights from another. Many cameras have this "HDR" feature built in as an option; or, programs such as Affinity Photo make it easy to do.

All these methods are really needed only in difficult light. They are not necessary for the great majority of photos.

 

[Kristoff_EM5]

Digital camera? = ETTR

 

[BrokenPhotography]

i prefer the underexposed image.

 

[Doug Haag]

Decades ago, I shot Black & White film. Recently, I have started shooting color with a digital camera that looks like my old 35mm camera. In the old days, if I was uncertain of the best exposure, I would bracket either the time or the f-shop. As a roll of B & W film was limited in the number of shots it would take, I would just pick 2 shots rather than 3. I think it was better to shoot once at the exposure the camera's meter recommended and the other, one stop above, to overexpose. I had a friend who was a professional and I think that he recommended a small overexposure rather than a small underexposure. This was some time ago.

Maybe I should just rephrase this. If one is slightly uncertain of the best approximate exposure should one, over or under, expose.

I'm not sure what you intended to mean when you used the term "overexposure". If you meat that the out of camera image is brighter than some "middle ground" brightness but still not so bright that the brightest important elements of the scene are not completely "blown out" with no detail remaining, then you received some really bad advice from those who told you to underexpose a digital image. This definition of "overexpose" is close to the preferred way to create raw digital images that have the highest quality of data for post processing adjustment.

See the respondent who said simply "Digital camera? = ETTR" You should look it up. One of the very first postings about this concept is by Luminous Landscape way back in 2003. It it explains why the process of collecting digital data is totally different than the old film days. Here it is https://luminous-landscape.com/expose-right/ (Note: don't be thrown by the now obsolete reference to 5 or 6 stops on dynamic range in a digital image. The principle doesn't change just because modern sensors record more stops.)

When I used the term "brightest important elements of the scene ...." in my first paragraph above, I meant something like the following. If there was a reflection from a chrome car bumper in your scene, you would not necessarily expect to see detail in that reflection, even with your naked eye, The term of art for that element is called a "specular highlight". So trying to keep that bright spot from being "blown out" would not be a limiting factor in how overexposed your settings are.

 

[jrtrent]

Decades ago, I shot Black & White film. Recently, I have started shooting color with a digital camera that looks like my old 35mm camera. In the old days, if I was uncertain of the best exposure, I would bracket either the time or the f-shop. As a roll of B & W film was limited in the number of shots it would take, I would just pick 2 shots rather than 3. I think it was better to shoot once at the exposure the camera's meter recommended and the other, one stop above, to overexpose. I had a friend who was a professional and I think that he recommended a small overexposure rather than a small underexposure. This was some time ago.

Maybe I should just rephrase this. If one is slightly uncertain of the best approximate exposure should one, over or under, expose.

When I shot black and white film as a kid, I got the same advice, that a slight overexposure was better than underexposing. I just got my prints at the local drug store, and they always looked fine. In my teens, I switched to color slide film, where the opposite advice was given, and I agreed with that, finding with slides that slightly underexposed shots could still be okay while overexposed ones ended up in the trash bin.

Straight out of camera JPEG's act, to my eyes, like color slide film, with slight underexposure looking better than slight overexposure. A couple of my digital cameras over the years have had so little highlight dynamic range that even properly exposed pictures would have too many blown highlights for me, so I purposely underexposed those shots, then used image editing software to restore better midtone and shadow values. Shots taken at base ISO could stand this mild shadow lifting without excessive noise becoming a problem. I find post-processing a pain, so I didn't end up keeping those cameras for very long.

 

[gollywop]

It's better to expose just right, namely, ETTR (Exposure to the Right). Take a look at

https://www.dpreview.com/articles/6641165460/ettr-exposed

https://www.dpreview.com/articles/8148042898/exposure-vs-brightening

--
gollywop

 

[lehill]

Decades ago, I shot Black & White film. Recently, I have started shooting color with a digital camera that looks like my old 35mm camera. In the old days, if I was uncertain of the best exposure, I would bracket either the time or the f-shop. As a roll of B & W film was limited in the number of shots it would take, I would just pick 2 shots rather than 3. I think it was better to shoot once at the exposure the camera's meter recommended and the other, one stop above, to overexpose. I had a friend who was a professional and I think that he recommended a small overexposure rather than a small underexposure. This was some time ago.

Maybe I should just rephrase this. If one is slightly uncertain of the best approximate exposure should one, over or under, expose.

Let's see, I count the over-/under- expose voting as about even with a couple of votes in-between.

I'll say that digital film is free so bracket your heart out. The only cost is the time to sort through them.

 

[Bill Ferris]

Maybe I should just rephrase this. If one is slightly uncertain of the best approximate exposure should one, over or under, expose.

As a general rule, digital images have more latitude to recover detail from the shadows. So, if you're limited to making a single exposure in a challenging lighting situation having the potential to produce an image with either blown highlights or dark shadows, I would err on the side of making a dark image and increasing lightness in post.

With that out of the way, we can dig a bit deeper into your question to offer more directed guidance.

Your f-stop and shutter speed settings, along with scene brightness, determine exposure. So, if there is an f-stop setting that delivers an optimal depth of field and a shutter speed that adequately freezes action, your exposure is set. At this point, ISO is used to manage the lightness of the photo. If you select an ISO that delivers a dark image in which highlights aren't blown out, you can lighten the dark areas in a photo editing app with no negative impact on image quality.

In this situation if you can use a faster f-stop, a slower shutter speed, a lower ISO and still achieve an image that renders the scene acceptably - protecting highlights while perhaps being a bit dark - the increased exposure (wider aperture abs longer exposure time) will reduce noise and give more latitude to recover detail in the shadows.

So, it is entirely consistent to use a strategy of optimizing exposure (the amount of light delivered to the sensor) while using a somewhat low ISO to make an image in which highlights are protected while midtones and shadows are a bit dark.

If using either exposure or ISO to produce an image that is globally too light for your taste, be careful to not over lighten highlights by more than about 1/2 stop. Beyond that, you'll risk making detail in the highlights unrecoverable.

--
Bill Ferris Photography
Flagstaff, AZ
http://www.billferris.photoshelter.com

 

[RetCapt]

I generally start with a pre-set of -1/3EV to pick up a bit of saturation. But then I bracket in both directions so that when I get to editing I have choices. It is seldom that I use +EV values, but it does happen. At a car show, in bright sunlight, I photographed a white car ('58 Chev Impala 'American Graffiti' clone) that filled the frame. This necessitated +EV compensation because the camera meter wanted to see this white as gray.

Some of my cameras have RAW. Some do not. To standardize post-processing I just use JPEG. Given the differing characteristics between JPEG and RAW, I want to give myself more opportunity to derive detail from highlights rather than shadows, hence the -1/3EV baseline.

in practice when bracketing I often use multiple -EV steps. In post processing I often find that I get more saturation (and to my eye, an enhanced image) using this method, albeit at the expense of shadow detail. Then it comes down to what I want in the photograph. There are circumstances where I prefer that shadow not reveal detail. The presence of people in a photograph can give it scale, but since they are not my photographic objective, for my purposes they are better off in silhouette. (I am neither a portrait nor a street shooter).

The difference between 0.0EV and -1/3EV is slight, so while the -1/3EV is generally my preferred starting point, that is not always my rule. The important thing is to evaluate each scene on its own characteristics, then bracket liberally to cover your bases. With film, bracketing used to be costly. Not so with digital.

 

[baloo_buc]

This applies to negative film. There the highlights are dark.

In digital world the highlights are white so use slightly underexposure (-0.33EV) to protect them. Some cameras allow even 3 to 5 stops underexposure to be processed very well.

 

[Michael Fryd]

Decades ago, I shot Black & White film. Recently, I have started shooting color with a digital camera that looks like my old 35mm camera. In the old days, if I was uncertain of the best exposure, I would bracket either the time or the f-shop. As a roll of B & W film was limited in the number of shots it would take, I would just pick 2 shots rather than 3. I think it was better to shoot once at the exposure the camera's meter recommended and the other, one stop above, to overexpose. I had a friend who was a professional and I think that he recommended a small overexposure rather than a small underexposure. This was some time ago.

Maybe I should just rephrase this. If one is slightly uncertain of the best approximate exposure should one, over or under, expose.

The underlying technology varies quite a bit between film and digital. The exposure strategies that give the best results for film may not give the best results with digital. A fundamental difference is the shape of the "response curve". With film, it has an "S" shape, and with digital it's more of a straight line. With film you need to hit the midpoint of the "S" (where the curve approximates a straight line). With Digital you can hit anywhere on the line. With film "Over-Exposure" means you have missed the center of the "S", and you are not getting the nice straight-line response. With Digital, a higher (or lower) exposure isn't a problem.

"Exposure" is the term we use to refer to the amount of light hitting the sensor/film. Usually, this is measured in terms of light per unit area. Exposure does not refer to whether the image is too light or too dark. An over-exposed negative can be printed as a dark, light, or normal print.

With digital, the term "over exposure" is typically used to describe a situation where there is a mismatch between the ISO setting and the exposure. Unlike film, this doesn't necessarily mean the exposure was too high, it might be the exposure was perfect, but the ISO was set too high. With digital the term "Over Exposure" can frequently be replaced by the phrase "ISO set too high".

With this viewpoint in mind, we can rephrase your question as to whether it is a good idea to set the ISO a little too high or a little too low for a particular exposure. When you look at it that way, you can see that there are options not practical with film.

One strategy for getting the best digital results is to decouple the exposure from the ISO setting.

The first step is to maximize exposure, this helps minimize image noise, and helps preserve shadow details. Get as much light as is practical on the subject. Choose the widest aperture that gives you sufficient depth of field. Choose the slowest shutter speed that doesn't yield objectionably motion blur.

Then you set you ISO. If you are worried about losing highlight detail, use an ISO setting that's a little lower than what your meter recommends.

Remember, with digital by varying your ISO setting, the same exact exposure will be called "under-exposure", "over-exposure", or "good exposure".

Shoot in RAW to give you the widest latitude to adjust image lightness when you process your image.

Another option with digital is to continue with manual Aperture and Shutter as above, but use Auto-ISO. If you are worried about blowing highlights, use negative "exposure compensation" to get the camera to choose a slightly lower ISO. Keep in mind that not all cameras allow "Exposure Compensation" when shooting in Manual Mode and Auto-ISO.

Note: "Exposure Compensation" (EC) simply sets a bias on the camera's metering system. The name is leftover from the days of film, when biasing the meter would change the exposure. On modern cameras EC might change the exposure, but it might also leave the exposure the same, and change the ISO.

 

[FafBill]

PHOTOGRAPHERS OF THE WORLD Thank You very much for the advice. I'll read everything again tomorrow night. Saturday I will go out into the world with my Canon and apply your advice to a variety of photos. Wish me luck and dry weather.

I'll probably be back Monday with more questions.

Thanks again.

 

[FrancoD]

We also open on Sunday .

no extra charge.

 

[techie takes pics]

Wish me luck and dry weather.

Wishing you lots of experience (*) and weathersealed equipment.

(*) 'experience is what you get when you were expecting something else'

 

[bobn2]

Negative film had a lot more latitude in the shadows than a digital sensor. And a lot less latitude in the highlights than a digital sensor. The general rule of for film was to underexpose and bring up the shadows in post.

A digital sensor doesn't have 'shadows' or 'highlights'. It's response is much more linear than film. As long as its DR is enough to accommodate the scene's tonal range, then yo can use just about any part of its characteristic you want, with the proviso that the more exposure you use the less noise you'll have. One important difference is that film clipped soft while digital clips hard, a but like the difference between tube and transistor amps.