ABSTRACT
Exposing to the Right One of the most commonly talked about techniques in digital photography is called exposing to the right or ETTR. If you want to obtain the highest quality from your digital images, then you need to shoot in RAW. Exposing to the right is a technique aimed at getting the maximum amount of information and performance from the camera’s digital sensor when set to its base ISO. When used correctly, your images will have greater signal-to-noise ratio, improved tonal range in the shadow areas and greater latitude when post-processing. Executed carelessly and the danger is that you completely blow the highlights in your image rendering them totally white, making it impossible to recover any information at all. Images, when ETTR is employed, have the appearance of being overexposed on the LCD screen, but this can be corrected in post-processing. You should also be mindful of clipping the highlights at the edges of the histogram. e amount of adjustment possible in an image depends on the dynamic range or contrast ratio of the scene. If you nd it dicult to evaluate the histogram, then use the highlight warning indicator (or ‘blinkies’), which ash when there are white areas within your exposure that contain no data. Some photographers nd this method easier to operate rather than analysing the histogram. e highlight warning indicator is not as accurate, but it’s better than doing nothing at all.
