Spot Metering – In Camera vs Separate Meter

Posted on October 1, 2018 by Andrew Astbury

Landscape Photography Exposure, ETTR and Highlight Spot Metering Accuracy

CLICK ME to watch the Video!

In this short(ish) video I want to show you why your camera spot meter can be something of a ‘let down’ in exposure terms when you are trying to obtain an accurate highlight reading for your scene.

Most ‘in camera’ spot meters are a lot more imprecise than the user imagines.

Nikon spot meter ‘spots’ are generally 4mm wide. That means 4mm ON THE SENSOR!

On an FX camera the sensor is roughly 36mm wide, so the ‘spot’ actually has a ‘window’ or ‘measuring footprint’ that is 1/9th of the viewfinders horizontal field of view.

And don’t think that because you use a Canon you’re any better off – in fact you’re worse off because Canon spots are a tiny bit BIGGER!

In this example I use a shot taken with a Zeiss 21mm – this lens has a horizontal angle of view of 81 degrees.

So the 4mm Nikon spot has an angle of view equivalent to 1/9th the frame and hence 1/9th the horizontal AoV of the lens, in other words 9 degrees.

Aimed at the brightest highlight in the sky its footprint takes in sky tones that are dramatically less than highlights. So the reading it will give me is ‘darker’ than it should be.

My D800E has it’s highlight clipping/blow point 3.6 stops above its mid tone.

If I then apply ETTR to this reading by exposing at +3 to +3.3 stops it will result in blown highlights.

But if I use a 1 degree spot meter aimed at exactly the same place its much narrower angle sees ONLY THE BRIGHT AREA I’m aiming at. This gives me a much BRIGHTER reading, allowing me to push the exposure by +3.3 stops without blowing any of my highlights.

Hope this all makes sense folks.

Don’t forget, any questions or queries then just ask!

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All the best

Andy

ETTR High Contrast Scene Processing.

Posted on August 19, 2018 by Andrew Astbury

ETTR High Contrast Scene Processing.

When faced with a high contrast scene like this most photographers would automatically resort to bracketing shots.

Sometimes you will be in a situation where shooting a bracketed sequence is difficult or impossible.

But a single image exposed to the right of the histogram – ETTR – where highlights are recorded at their maximum level of exposure can allow the camera sensor to capture far more detail in the darker areas than Lightroom will allow you to see at first glance.

Exposing to the right (of the in-camera histogram) correctly means that you expose the brightest scene highlights AS HIGHLIGHTS.

But it’s a balancing act between exposing them fully, and ‘blowing’ them.

Getting the ETTR exposure correct invariably means that the sensor receives MORE exposure across all tonal ranges, so you end up with more usefully recoverable shadow detail too.

In this video I show you a full Lightroom and Photoshop workflow to produce a noise-free image from a raw file exposed in just such a way.

Members of my Patreon site can download the all the workflow steps together with the raw file so that they can follow my processing, and perhaps come up with their own versions too!

Lumenzia Plugin for Photoshop: https://getdpd.com/cart/hoplink/21529?referrer=c0vpzfhvq7ks8cw8c

Lumenzia + Comprehensive Training: https://getdpd.com/cart/hoplink/21529?referrer=c0vpzfhvq7ks8cw8c&p=165704

Just to keep you up to speed on my video channel, here’s my previous video from last week which illustrates how I do my dust-spot and blemish removal in Photoshop:

ETTR Processing in Lightroom

Posted on June 25, 2018 by Andrew Astbury

ETTR Processing in Lightroom

When we shoot ETTR (expose to the right) in bright, harsh light, Lightroom can sometimes get the wrong idea and make a real ‘hash’ of rendering the raw file.

Sometimes it can be so bad that the less experienced photographer can get the wrong impression of their raw file exposure – and in some extreme cases they may even ‘bin’ the image thinking it irretrievably over exposed.

I’ve just uploaded a video to my YouTube channel which shows you exactly what I’m talking about:

The image was shot by my client and patron Paul Smith when he visited the Mara back in October last year, and it’s a superb demo image of just how badly Lightroom can demosaic a straight forward +1.6 Ev ETTR shot.

Importing the raw file directly into Lightroom gives us this:

But importing the raw file directly into RawTherapee with no adjustments gives us this:

Just look at the two histogram versions – Lightroom is doing some crazy stuff to the image ‘in the background’ as there are ZERO develop settings applied.

But if you watch the video you’ll see that it’s quite straight forward to regain all that apparent ‘blown detail’.

And here’s the important bit – we do so WITHOUT the use of the shadow or highlight recovery sliders. Anyone who has purchased my sharpening videos HERE knows that those two sliders can VERY EASILY cause undesirable ‘pseudo-sharpening’ halos, and they should only be used with caution.

The way I process this +1.6 stop ETTR exposure inside Lightroom has revealed all the superb mid tone detail and given us a really good image that we could take into Photoshop and improve with some precision localized adjustments.

So don’t let Lightroom control you – you need to control IT!

Thanks for reading and watching.

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