Expose to the Right, Don't Trust your Luminance Histogram

So, I just read this great post on Luminous Landscape about noise and posterization and why you should expose to the right. I decided to test this out with a sunset shot, which is where I usually tend to get posterization with even the lightest hand in post. I wasn't surprised to find that I could do much more with my colors, since I used to encounter problems when exposing my sunsets to the left to "saturate" the sky. I was surprised to find how little you can actually trust your luminance histogram.

Why expose to the right? You should really read the link the the Luminous Landscape post, because they explain it much better than I do, but it goes a little something like this.

Your histogram shows you how much light you have in your dark, mid and light tones. Anything on the left side of the histogram is black, anything on the right is white and anything in between is red, green, blue and a mix thereof. What I didn't know until I read that post is that an image with the histogram peak sitting to the left has less detail compared to one sitting to the right due to the way your camera's sensor records light. The shadows get roughly 1/16th of the available data space compared to the highlights. That, therefore, means if you make your image a little brighter instead of a little darker you'll have more headroom when you start pushing your pixels in post, and less noise to boot. You just need to be very careful not to go too far to the right, or you clip your highlights and then you just loose all detail to the point of no return.

This is where you need to be very weary of what your luminance histogram is telling you! Yes, expose to the right and keep an eye on that right hand slope, but if you don't know what it's really saying you may be clipping one of your RGB channels.

The image at the top of this post is a perfect example of when you need to keep an eye on your channels. Basically, in a sunset image you have a dark blue sky and some glowing orange highlights. This puts your blue channel somewhere near the bottom of the histogram, your green near the middle and the red all the way up at the top. If you just look at the luminance histogram, which is an average of your RGB histograms, you could be clipping your reds and still think you have some room to spare. I thought I had at least another 2/3 of a stop I could have gone to the right, but when I loaded this into Aperture I found my red channel highlights went right up against the wall. Luckily, shooting in RAW gave me the capability of reeling those highlights in. If I would have gone that extra 2/3 stop, though, I would have had some really obvious red clipping in form of a big orange spot at the hottest part of the picture.

Before I go, just let me say that exposing to the right works especially well with higher ISOs to avoid excessive noise and in images with color detail in the shadows which you might want to recover. It's not something you always need to do though. You camera's auto exposure probably does a good enough job in most cases where you can trust what your meter is telling you, but if you ever find you're getting really blotchy or noisy pictures, just give this a try.

My First Big Expo

This weekend was the Mother, Baby and Toddler Show in Estepona, at which Ellie launched her new business, www.ecobebes.eu. Just so you know, we have so many nappies in our house now it's not even funny, HA! And, by the way, her launch went very well. There weren't as many people as were expected, but it was good for Ellie as she was able to spend a lot of time explaining "the new" cloth diapering to each individual.

As Ellie was going, we decided I should look into exhibiting some of my maternity and baby shots as well. I got the entire corridor at the main entrance for 150€ and was able to get my name out there for the first time. Everything was a bit last minute for me, and I would have liked to have had flyers, but in the end I was able to make some good contacts and set up a few potential portrait sessions.

Here's a couple of the pics I displayed and what the corridor looked like...

I'M FREE!!!

Today was my last day at work, and tomorrow is my first day at work. That might not make sense, but it will in a minute. Just hold that thought.


When Ellie spurred me on to get the job at the Marbella Apple store I was a little apprehensive. My Spanish was so/so. I knew a few cool tricks with the Mac, but honestly didn't even know how to change the memory in a MacBook. Pitifully, I didn't even know how to reinstall a system, or even start from the install disk for that matter! These things had never occurred to me as necessary or interesting, but that didn't matter to the man who hired me. He was looking for someone passionate and interested in Apple. I was hired, and I jumped in head first. Before long I was learning everything from the most basic diagnostics to how to solve kernel panics and replace components. My job was getting interesting and I was learning and growing.

I met some really interesting people in the following months, some of whom I have become friends with, and some I will collaborate with on future ventures. The most interesting characters I met in my two and a half years at Benotac were the ones who make their living from what they see in their viewfinder. Every week some photographer would come into the store asking me about some program, or a memory upgrade, or to invest in a new workstation, but for every question they asked me I would fire back two more. What did they shoot, how did they do it or if they'd seen 'x' photographer's work. It became clear to me that, although I really loved (and still do love) the Apple scene, my real passion was for creating images. Apple computers and the Mac OS are fun and a joy to work with, but holding a camera in my hands inspires me to seek new boundaries. It's not that I want people to see what I see, but to see what I can shape though my lens using light, reflectors, depth, aperture, shutter speed, angles, point of view and texture.

Taking pictures has become my new mission. Work can be anything you make of it. Taking the fucking rubbish out is work. It's what you make of that work and how you present it that matters. I want what I create to matter. I want my work to influence. I want people to see what I do and laugh and smile and think, "That guy has a great job!"

That job starts now.