Which is better??

[sormi]

To over expose or under expose and then try to corect with software?

I just ordered a 20D. I was looking at several other cameras like the olympus E300. I notices that most ot the photos were flat, dull and lack luster. The color is there but not the bright wondeful shot I wanted to see.

The Canon 20D is much better but i've seen some pretty dull photos too. I know some people have said you can bump up your fstop or send it back to Canon and have them recalibrate it.

Any inputs??

[Poco]

The 20D doesn't do as much in camera processing of the images than do most P&S cameras. Those "bright and wonderful" often come from post processing the images (sounds like you want more saturation). You can configure the camera to do more processing or you can do it yourself in Photoshop (or other software).

I'm not sure how the fstop will make the images look more or less dull, unless you are talking about focus problems. In those cases it could be that the depth of field is low. Increasing the fstop will help that but cut down on your light, which will require a slower shutter speed and more blur due to camera shake if you don't use a tripod. Also, in-camera processing can including more sharpening or you can sharpen the photos yourself, again in Photoshop.

Perhaps you can post some examples?

[tim]

To over expose or under expose and then try to corect with software?

I just ordered a 20D. I was looking at several other cameras like the olympus E300. I notices that most ot the photos were flat, dull and lack luster. The color is there but not the bright wondeful shot I wanted to see.

The Canon 20D is much better but i've seen some pretty dull photos too. I know some people have said you can bump up your fstop or send it back to Canon and have them recalibrate it.

Any inputs??

If you underexpose you can increase the brightness, at the expense of some noise. If you overexpose you lose lots of data, and usually can't do much about it. Underexposure is ALWAYS preferred to over-exposure. The 20D exposes for the highlights in the picture, so by default it's fine.

Dull photos are because of the photographer, or lack of good post processing. Sending a camera to Canon because you take dull photos is useless. "Bumping your f-stop" makes no difference to this, f-stops basically controls depth of field, along with the set of related parameters to give you a good exposure. I suggest you read up on the basics of photographic theory if this doesn't make sense to you.

[bauerman]

I would suggest reading the "Exposing to the Right" article on the Luminous Landscape website - very good information and recommends pushing your exposures to the right - or pushing to the overexposure side......

[tim]

I would suggest reading the "Exposing to the Right" article on the Luminous Landscape website - very good information and recommends pushing your exposures to the right - or pushing to the overexposure side......

Exposing to the right is another name for correctly exposing images, watching the histogram to make sure you do. Just be sure not to push them too far to the right that you lose important details.

[bauerman]

I posted that because you mentioned that underexposure is "ALWAYS" preferred to overexposure - but I would disagree with that.......in many situations..........

[tim]

Fair enough - but overexposure loses data, underexposure just reduces its accuracy, hence the "noise" when you increase the levels. Learning how to correctly expose the area you're interested in, even if it means blowing unimportant highlights, is a skill, one i'm working on :)

[bauerman]

I am working on the same skill Tim - and it's killing me! :-)

When you get it figured out - PM me!

[tim]

It's all in the metering... obviously! I use partial or EC a lot, as well as the histogram.