An experiment on White...

Stryker

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Have you shot a subject on a white backgound, or your dog in the snow, or a bride in her white wedding dress and upon uploading to your PC, the white looks grey? Here is one solution. Bump up the exposure level to "+1"

Photos of my neighbor's white van were taken a few minutes ago. No editing was done, only converted the RAW file to jpeg

ISO 100, F/5.6, Av mode, shutter speed was at 1/800, exposure level at "0"

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Then I bumped up the exposure level to "+1", same settings at ISO 100, f/5.6, however the aperture speed went down to 1/400

5560449116_8ca0f8ac4d.jpg


You can see the difference if the exposure level is adjusted to "+1"

So, when shooting on a white backgound, your dog in the snow, or the bride in her wedding dress, bump it up. You dont want the mother of the bride on your tail your whole lifetime, would you???
 
Well, snow is also very reflective and can easily be blown out. Especially if your subject is wearing dark clothing like black snow pants, or a dark jacket that you have to expose longer for. There's a pro and con, and bumping the exposure to +1EV isn't always the answer when dealing with whites. It could just harm the photo more than help it. Same thing applies to wedding dresses. There's a fine line to walk.
 
Getting a correct white balance to begin with might help as well.
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Having a camera with RGB color-aware light metering will help ensure that that large, solid-toned object is rendered as "white". Having a camera with dumb, color-blind light metering will tend to make that large, solid-colored object into a nice "blah" 18 percent gray.
 
depends what your shooting... when shooting white birds, for example, its quite common to go -2/3 ev as the light meter on the camera may adjust so that the bird is way to dark.

when in doubt just bracket. really though, with post processing I rarely have come across a situation which didn't allow me to adjust exposure after the fact without degrading the image quality.
 
This touches on the issue of metering.

Cameras use reflected light meters, which assume (via their programing) that everything is a medium toned scene, and thus the camera tries to expose for that. The problem is that when your scene isn't mid toned (much of it is white etc), then the meter's recommendation (and thus the auto modes) will be wrong.
To get it right, you need to recognize what you are shooting (what the meter is reading) and adjust your exposure accordingly. In the case of white being predominant in the scene, yes +1 may well be the correct result. But might also be +1 2/3 or +2...so rather than blindly using +1...learn about metering and exposure and understand how to get it right all the time.

Also How to use a Grey Card ~ Mike Hodson Photography

Lastly, this isn't a 'digital' issue so I'm moving the thread out of the digital section. :er:
 

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