Why My Photos Are Usually Overexposed?

[bleeblu]

I own a Fujifilm Finepix X10 and have been shooting everything under the sun with it. Inside, outside, flash, no flash, right side up and upside down. I'd say 90% of all the photos I take are overexposed. I don't know if this is the correct term for it but in my histogram my highlights are clipped. So when I see this in the preview after I take a picture, I adjust my settings to let less light come in. When I do that, however, the rest of the image gets darker. Obviously this is going to happen but how can I make sure my highlights don't get blown?

 

[KmH]

Some highlights should be clipped. They are usually termed specular highlights.

So, to a large degree what kind of highlight you're taking about is pertinent. Highlights on a persons face should not be clipped, but it's OK if highlights on the chrome on a car or ripples on water are clipped.

 

[bleeblu]

Okay, that helps out a lot. Most of my clippings are from reflections and the sky. I was led to believe a clipped histogram was a no-no because of data loss.

 

[Kerbouchard]

Okay, that helps out a lot. Most of my clippings are from reflections and the sky. I was led to believe a clipped histogram was a no-no because of data loss.

The people who led you to that conclusion were morons. The only time you should care about data loss is in areas you wish to hold detail.

A digital camera simply does not have the dynamic range to account for specular highlights and shadows. The important part is that areas that you wish to hold detail in are not clipped. For instance, a white wedding dress should not be overexposed, ever.

It may be that you are asking too much of your camera or are not properly using lighting. Generally, I do not like overexposing the sky, but if you take a shot with a person and the sky in it, either the person will be a silhouette or the sky will be blown out. The solution is to use flash to bring the exposure level of your subject up so that it balances with the sky.

In circumstances like that, you either have to decrease the dynamic range of the shot, change shooting positions, or live with clipped highlights.

As far as chrome, reflections, or light sources, in most cases, they will be blown out. It's not a big deal.

 

[KmH]

It is true that clipped highlights are not recoverable. Any part of a photo that is at 255 in all 3 color channels is blown (pure white) and has no details left.

Skys are not highlights, but the Sun being in a scene would be a specular highlight. If your skies are over exposed you need to use a GND filter, make 2 exposures to blend post process, or use stobed light so you can control the exposures of ambient light and strobed light separately with a single shutter release.

 

[Big Mike]

Cameras (photography in general) is limited by what we call the 'dynamic range'. That is the range of tones that can be 'well' captured in a single photo. A good digital camera can probably capture a range in the neighborhood of 5 stops. A typical scene that you might take a photo of, may have a range of 10 or 12 stops. So you need to realize that a camera can't record details in all of the scene, with a single exposure. If you expose for the dark/shadow areas, then the highlights will be blown. If you expose for the highlights, then the shadows will be blacked out.
So you, as the photographer, have to make the choice of what you will expose for in your photo. For example, in a landscape photo, the sky may be a lot brighter than the land...so you may have to make the choice to either expose for the land or the sky....but not both.

There are ways to help this problem. For example, graduated filters or an 'HDR' (high dynamic range) processing technique.