When Shooting RAW – Overexpose for better pictures

You’ve always heard that you should carefully set your exposure to get the best picture.  Those dreaded results of underexposure or overexposure were to be avoided as much as possible.  If they were looking at a histogram everyone seemed to be trying for that beautiful bell curve.  If you’re shooting JPG files, that’s still the rule to follow – but when shooting RAW files you might want to consider consciously overexposing your shots –  just a little bit.

In an earlier post I discussed how RAW files capture so much more light and data than JPG – including in the white and black areas of the image.  In addition, a digital camera interprets brightness far differently than does the human eye. If you’re looking at a histogram, it’s the right-most 14% of the histogram that contains 50% of the brightness levels captured by the camera.  So, when you’re setting up a shot, check your histogram and see if you have a lot of space to the right.  If you do,  you might want to think of increasing your exposure a half stop or so and taking a few more shots.  As long as the histogram isn’t stacked up to the right side – you’ve captured more data without blowing out your whites.  Just to be doubly sure you don’t blow out the whites, you can always turn on the camera’s highlight warning to alert you to any potential trouble spots.   

The other significant part of doing this is that by slightly overexposing the entire image, you will lighten up your darker areas and reduce some of the “noise”.  When you begin editing the file in Camera RAW you can put your highlights back in balance and still keep the advantage of lightening some of the darker areas with less “noise”.   I’ve tried this and the results have been a much improved image capture – with a better final image as an outcome.  You might want to play with this and see how it works for you in different situations.  Best – Bill

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