Am I relying on my Histogram too much

[Skids]

I have been taking pictures today of promo girls at a car show and must admit I have been chimping!

I was using a 400D with 28-135 IS Lens, 550EX Flash (For fill-in occasionally).

I had the camera set on P mode (still learning!) at 100 ISO center weighted metering and shooting in RAW.

The pictures looked OK but I was seeing blown out highlights on the sky and most of my histogram to the left (apart from the peak at the right where the sky was blown out)

To avoid the blown highlights I was bringing the exposure down by 1 or 2/3rds but when processing in DPP I thought they looked a bit dark so I have been increasing the exposure again.

Should I have just ignored the blown highlights and histogram and not touched the exposure compensation (considering I wasn't bothered if the sky was blown out)?

Many Thanks

Darren

[ssim]

If you don't mind blown skies then you could have ignored that factor which is where you were probably getting the blown highlight signals from on your histogram.

Shooting something like what you explained I would find myself an optimal exposure and then switch to manual and stick with that as long as the ambient lighting is consistent. When I shoot something such as this outdoors I use a hand held light meter which has served me very well. The sensitivity of the cameras meter can fluctuate alot from one shot to the next and in reality not much has changed.

If you have a blue sky with clouds you should be able to expose so that you get your subject and the background properly exposed. If you have a gray day or a sky with not much in the way of clouds they have a tendency to blow out.

[BillMarks]

Also, the image that shows on your camera's lcd is a jpeg. The blown out areas (the technical term for which is "the blinkies") can be an artifact of the jpeg conversion process. So a shot with a bit of blinkies on your lcd will often have no blown-out areas to it in RAW form.

[Skids]

Many thanks for the info.

I shall bear that in mind next time.

[C2S]

From what I've read on these forums, the incorrect blinkies can be reduced by the following ways:

1. Use the neutral picture style (none of the colors are exaggerated in this picture style)
2. Reduce the contrast to the minimum in this picture style (reduces highlight clipping)
3. Reduce the saturation to the minimum as well (reduces individual color channel clipping - stronger effect than in 1.)
4. Use Adobe RGB color space setting in the camera. Personally, I'm not 100% sure if this is effective - however, I'm using it at the moment.

The reason for these is, apparently, that those settings are applied to all JPEG-images in the camera, whether they are the actual recorded images or the thumbnails used in reviewing the shot image.

Of course, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.