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Anonymous
>>124642 >Use a gray card? This is theoretically the most accurate, but I never do it. Find out what a medium tone looks like and meter off something that looks about that tone. Lots of pavement works as a gray card. Or, once you develop an understanding of tones, you can usually meter off anything and compensate.
But there's some advantages to overexposing I'll get to in a minute, for which metering with the histogram is your friend. (Learn to read a histogram if you don't know how. Actually, reading histograms combined with judicious spot-metering of different points in the scene is probably the most accurate way.)
>The general advice on the net is to underexpose, then fix in post.
This is usually very wrong. The more exposure a sensor gets, the more dynamic range it has. To get the best results from a digital sensor, one has to overexpose as much as possible without blowing anything out and pull it back.
(This is assuming you're shooting raw. If you shoot JPEG- which isn't a good idea- nail the exposure exactly as you want it.)
The exceptions are some night scenes like this. Underexposed and pushed is better than overexposed with motion blur, for instance, and increasing the ISO will compromise the dynamic range advantage of overexposure. Adjust the shutter speed for more exposure if you can, but leave things alone otherwise.
>on CRTs, underexposed images like these are just a blotch of black
No, CRTs actually have broader dynamic range than LCDs. If you PP your shots, especially, a CRT provides huge advantages for editing and displaying photographs. Look at them side by side sometime; almost anyone who's done so that I know winds up switching. CRTs are cheap, too.
I just have a laptop, but sitting on the desk next to it is a calibrated CRT I hook up whenever I'm editing photographs.
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