Issues with exposure. Sony a9

Looking for advice / guidance from fellow photographers, especially Sony and other mirrorless users. Multiple times since I bought my a9 last April, I've had a strange issue while using on camera flash.

What happens is I take an image, and upon review it looks well exposed. Then when I get onto the computer it's very dark, underexposed by about 1-1.5 stops. This isn't always the case, but it's happened at 2-3 events I've shot.

*This only happens when using on camera flash. I've never had anything close to this happen when using no flash or off camera flash.* It appears well exposed on the camera, yet on the computer the on camera flash looks very dim, as if it fired on barely any power.

I mainly use the in camera exposure meter to for exposure. I do check the histogram sometimes but not as often. Last time this happened I turned down the brightness on my camera monitor and EVF, and that seemed to help, but it's still happening sometimes.

Lastly, this was never an issue I ran into while shooting Canon. Please someone lend some guidance. Thank you.

P.S. I don't have any side by side examples to show at this time as the camera is not with me. Sorry.

Jarvis Creative Studios wrote in post #18564524
Looking for advice / guidance from fellow photographers, especially Sony and other mirrorless users. Multiple times since I bought my a9 last April, I've had a strange issue while using on camera flash.

What happens is I take an image, and upon review it looks well exposed. Then when I get onto the computer it's very dark, underexposed by about 1-1.5 stops. This isn't always the case, but it's happened at 2-3 events I've shot.

*This only happens when using on camera flash. I've never had anything close to this happen when using no flash or off camera flash.* It appears well exposed on the camera, yet on the computer the on camera flash looks very dim, as if it fired on barely any power.

I mainly use the in camera exposure meter to for exposure. I do check the histogram sometimes but not as often. Last time this happened I turned down the brightness on my camera monitor and EVF, and that seemed to help, but it's still happening sometimes.

Lastly, this was never an issue I ran into while shooting Canon. Please someone lend some guidance. Thank you.

P.S. I don't have any side by side examples to show at this time as the camera is not with me. Sorry.

Possibly an import setting in your editing software is reacting poorly on flash shots? What software are you using? I had a similar issue with Lightroom a couple of years ago, where images would come off the camera ok and then immediately drop about 1.5ev on the final import. Had to go reset defaults to clear it up.

Do you shoot ARW or just JPG? If ARW, link to a file for help here.

Have you tried opening on another programme to see if that's the same?

I shoot RAW, but the story has gotten stranger. I was shooting an event for my friend and he was complaining to me about how the pictures were unbelievably dark and could not be saved. He's a really renowned photographer so I took his word for it, since I wasn't able to check the images at the time. That's when I made this post because I did have an issue before where the exposure was darker than what I had anticipated.

But now that I'm at my computer I'm wondering if something on his end is off. This isn't a great picture but it's one of the examples he sent me. Top is SOOC in LR on my computer. Bottom is the example he sent me of what it looked like. They're very different. When I asked if he was applying some filter on import he laughed and said no.

He said almost all of the images were completely underexposed by 1.5-2 stops. Here's just a quick reel of RAW previews that I pulled out. To me they don't look bad. Some are just a bit underexposed, but could easily be edited to look fine. Unless something is REALLY off on my monitor, but it's calibrated.

Post a link to a file sharing server on which you can put a RAW file which the other guy complained about darkness (underexposure) but you have no issue with that same RAW file.
We can then download and open that RAW file in whatever RAW convertor we have, and let you know the result.

Wilt wrote in post #18564695
Post a link to a file sharing server on which you can put a RAW file which the other guy complained about darkness (underexposure) but you have no issue with that same RAW file.
We can then download and open that RAW file in whatever RAW convertor we have, and let you know the result.

https://www.dropbox.co​m …504uh65/DSC0693​6.ARW?dl=0 here you go. This is one that I think is a bit underexposed but can be pretty easily fixed in post. Definitely not 1.5-2 stops underexposed like he said though.

Yea, it looks OK to me. Maybe 1/2 stop under. No problem pulling shadows a bit (not that I would necessarily brighten them as much as this)