Just shoot RAW and you can easily tweak well beyond 1 stop +/- after the fact using Canon, BreezeBrowser, or Capture One software (and there are probably others as well).
As has likely been mention, you are generally better off under exposing a little as it seems easier to pull the detail out of shadows than to recover blown highlights.
If RAW slows you down too much, then just bracket your exposures. The matrix meter is pretty darn good except for the most extreme conditions. Just be sure you have your contrast, saturation, and sharpness settings as you want them because they will be harder to tweak after-the-fact if you go JPEG instead of RAW.
Michael
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Carry a decent laptop on your wedding jobs. Shoot a couple of test pix, extract the Jpegs and look at them. Judge the exposure by eye, especially looking at your main subjects. Bring up the histogram to se how it is distributed. You'll soon be able to use the histogram to tell you quickly how to adjust your exposures.
If you do this, there is an added bonus, in that you'll be able to give real feedback to your clients before they go home!
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
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Just shoot RAW and you can easily tweak well beyond 1 stop +/- after the fact using Canon, BreezeBrowser, or Capture One software (and there are probably others as well).
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Not entirely accurate. There is almost no overexposure headroom with Canon's FVU. Apparently there's a good bit more with Capture One. Adobe and Breezebrowser I'm not sure about.
Regarding whether you can tweak exposure to perfection, here are several things to consider:
The histogram will show you if you have highlights at exposure levels above the main portions of the image by plotting a very thin line of pixels down on the bottom right floor of the histogram (and often a very thin spike on the right). Sometimes this is okay, since we expect white eye highlights, white reflections off chrome bumpers, etc.
My own personal "good enough exposure" rule of thumb is when data ends in the rightmost quadrant of the histogram. I know that the data in the image is good enough to make a fine print or whatever in that case, and I can do the last little bit of tweaking in Photoshop to normalize the exposure values to fill the entire range of 0-255 with Image-Adjust Levels.
-Noel
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
As for over-exposure, it depends on what is over-exposed. I was being general, and for your general color/intensity ranges you do have some headroom. Since the original question was about wedding photos, it is very true that if you overexpose the white gown you will be very hard-pressed to pull that detail back.
However, the general rule with the 10D seems to be to err on the side of slide under-exposure if unsure as feedback has been that it is easier to push the shadow detail out than to pull back highlights.
As for the software, Canon's FVU is pretty decent but very simple and lacking in significant fine-tuning. I am still playing with both, but will likely end up purchasing both BreezeBrowzer and Capture One's DSLR LE...
Michael
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
"...plotting a very thin line of pixels down on the bottom right floor of the histogram..."
Noel & all,
Why is there sometimes a perfectly smooth horizontal line of uniform thickness to the right end of histogram field wheras other times there is a downward jaggedy fall-off to the right end of histgram field? The former represents a "condition" & the latter represents pixels?
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Jeff, there may be no easy answer. Understanding what the histogram is will give you the best foundation for reading it. Note that there are histograms in Photoshop as well.
The histogram is simply a graph with very, very narrow columns. Each column represents how many of the pixels in the image are at each luminance level, from black (0 luminance) on the left to white (max luminance) on the right. The more pixels in the image at a given level, the higher the column.
An image that's entirely one color will have a single spike in one column.
An image that's a gradient from white to black with an equal number of pixels at each level will make a solid bar - the columns will be the same height all the way across.
An image that's properly exposed will typically have a "mountainous looking" collectdion of columns, running out almost to the sides, but none or very very little actually jammed up against the sides. This indicates you have luminance levels filling the entire range of possible values, with none or very few actually occupying minimum or maximum values.
An image that's more or less properly exposed with a few small, bright highlights will often show a thin line of pixels out to the right beyond the end of "the mountains". Likewise, an image with a few very deep shadows will show a thin line out to the left edge.
Hope this helps.
-Noel
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
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