Question of preference

[Bendihossan]

I've been editing a lot of photos recently and it got me thinking what style of brightness in a shot people prefer in average...

So wedding togs: Do you compromise the overall brightness of a shot & expose for the dress or average dress & background for a bright dress?

For example, would you:

A) Expose for a dress and compromise getting a dark background.
B) Meter for the average scene getting a bright (but not blown) dress & hilights.
C) Get close to a blown dress & hilights and call it high key.

 

[Clickawaymedia]

I was always under the impression you should expose to the left... its easier to recover shadows than highlights, so expose for the dress!!

But if you shoot raw, expose for the dress, you can then raise the exposure a couple of stops and merge the pics, creating a shot thats all good!

 

[TriggerHappy]

I was always under the impression you should expose to the left... its easier to recover shadows than highlights, so expose for the dress!!

But if you shoot raw, expose for the dress, you can then raise the exposure a couple of stops and merge the pics, creating a shot thats all good!

Funny you should mention exposing to the left. It was brought up in this thread and there was a little discussion of it. The conclusion seemed to be that it was traditionally a trick when using slide film that was intolerant to overexposure. This article explains the principle of exposing to the right which is argued to be more relevant to digital cameras to help minimise the introduction of noise.

 

[Spiritflier]

I tend to expose to the right precisely for the reasons mentioned by Jamie... One of the nice things about the 5DMKII is the amount of highlight recovery that's possible as long as you're careful. I much prefer to bring the exposure down a bit in post than have to increase it and introduce noise.

Si

 

[trencheel303]

The middle option in the poll. I like my histograms to be centered or right biased. If it is left biased I will ask myself why and try to center it as much as possible without blowing any vital bits.

 

[LongLensPhotography]

Somewhere between B and C for me. Highlights can be recovered quite well as long as RAW is reasonable, while shadows are always the noisiest part, even at ISO100. If unsure you can do a couple different exposures and choose the best. Lightroom does the rest.