Exposing to the right or this is not your father's camera

[JAS_Photo]

Let me start by saying that the UK publishes two of the most useful photography magazines out there one being "Digital SLR Photography" and the other "Digotal Camera World"

So, one of the recent articles has been concerning exposing to the right or as it is acronymed ETTR. Darwin Wigget also mentions it in one of the links Marko put up concerning the use of filters.

So basically, in this technique your histogram shows information moved to the right but not clipping the highlights. The reasoning behind it is that the bright area still has information and the dark areas will have more information too. So once you adjust your photo in photoshop or what ever software you use to adjust the exposure you will have all the possible information without the noise. So in other words to get technical this allows for more tonal levels and the more tonal levels available the smoother they are and the less noise. I guess everyone already knows that if you under expose a photo then try and pull it up to proper exposure, how noisy it can be.

Any further comments?

[Mad Aussie]

It's sound thinking but many scenes are difficult to influence the histogram either way without clipping the other end. I think this technique would work well on the right scene but something with more high dynamic range might be difficult. Also scenes that are predominantly dark might not work well either.

[penodr]

JAS is correct. I have read a bunch on this and basically the right side ( light side ) of the histogram has more tonal values than the left side. This is why noise shows up in dark areas of the photo first. When you push the histogram to the right you are using more tonal values to record your data and will have less noise in the image.

Dave

[Greg_Nuspel]

When you expose to the right and there is clipping on the left it is time for HDR.