Should you deliberately underexpose for color?

I shoot in RAW and have always tried to either nail exposure or err on the side of slide overexposure.

I just read in one of Rick Sammon's books that he suggests deliberately underexposing images to get more saturation in your images. Is this correct and a prudent thing to do?

You should probably take a color chart and gray card out in different lighting situations and test to see how far under you need to go to get maximum saturation. I use to shoot allot of Kodachrome 25 and I always shoot it at 32 ISO for the best saturation. Digital acts allot like chromes so these techniques helped me when I made the switch. If you seen some of my images here I've been accused of saturating images when in fact I get those deep colors by exposing what I call properly. Try it. Do the test it will be worth it in the long run. Whats it cost ya a little time and then you'll know how far under you need to go if at all.

yes i do i expose for anything up to one stop under the camera reading (1dmkiin)
realy gives the colours some pop tend to do it more when im on assiment then when im shooting for portfolio

air- I'm not familiar with a color chart; can you explain? Assuming I find and get one of these charts what am I supposed to do with them when I am out shooting a scene?

Zilly-Are you saying that your shots have -EC, with the maximum being -1 EC? If so, what are you visually using to judge the amount of -EC to use for each image?

I would have to say that when you can nail the exposure, do so. When in doubt I do tend to err on the side of underexposure rather than overexposure. Once you overexpose the information is just lost. With underexposure I stand a greater change of recovering highlights in post than if it was overexposed and trying to recover shadow.

RichNY wrote in post #3388378
I shoot in RAW and have always tried to either nail exposure or err on the side of slide overexposure.

I just read in one of Rick Sammon's books that he suggests deliberately underexposing images to get more saturation in your images. Is this correct and a prudent thing to do?

If you're shooting raw anyway, why the need to underexpose? You can just as easily turn down the exposure during raw conversion and you'll have a cleaner picture than underexposing in the camera and then trying to compensate, with a resultant increase in noise, if you over did the underexposure.

Place your rich colors on the same exposure level as middle gray. Place bright, lighter colors 1/2 to one stop aboce it, and dark colors (like brick red) 1/2 stop below it. If you can spot meter off of the color of interest, then you can assign it middle gray with your exposure.

But Leo is right, in that it makes sense to produce an otherwise well exposed image, then with editing get your colors where you want.

This part I'd take to the bank, though -- don't increase saturation before you've deepened your midtones with curves. I think most people have saturation problems because they haven't applied a nice S-curve, so their tonal range is very linear -- and this means the midtone colors are brighter than they should be. If you bump saturation without fixing the midtones, all you'll get is cartoonish colors that look like a trip to Candyland on poppies.

I'd suggest reading these articles on RAW and exposure:
- http://www.adobe.com …ing_digitalrawc​apture.pdf
- http://www.adobe.com …logbox/why_shoo​t_raw.html
- http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorial​s/expose-right.shtml

When shooting RAW, half the work is getting the right exposure, and half is processing the data to make the image you imagined. Both parts are equally important (IMO), and ignoring either one will lead to sub-optimal results.

Cheers,

Geoff S.

RichNY wrote in post #3388682
air- I'm not familiar with a color chart; can you explain? Assuming I find and get one of these charts what am I supposed to do with them when I am out shooting a scene?

Zilly-Are you saying that your shots have -EC, with the maximum being -1 EC? If so, what are you visually using to judge the amount of -EC to use for each image?

So sorry you used to be able to buy them at just about any camera store. I think kodak used make them. They are basically all the colors and if I remember right they came with a gray card. What I would do with a trans film is take the color chart and the gray card and set it in the different lighting situations I would be in and photograph them using different ISO/ exposure settings and see after the film came back which one was the most accurate in color and use that info to make exposures.

With digital its kind of the same thing. You don't have latitude up but you do down so if you under expose a bit you will get rich colors and not loose high lights. If you overexpose you will loose lots of info in the high end.

Do the test so you see by how much you need to go under what your meter is telling you.

DrPablo wrote in post #3388833
Place your rich colors on the same exposure level as middle gray. Place bright, lighter colors 1/2 to one stop aboce it, and dark colors (like brick red) 1/2 stop below it. If you can spot meter off of the color of interest, then you can assign it middle gray with your exposure.

But Leo is right, in that it makes sense to produce an otherwise well exposed image, then with editing get your colors where you want.

This part I'd take to the bank, though -- don't increase saturation before you've deepened your midtones with curves. I think most people have saturation problems because they haven't applied a nice S-curve, so their tonal range is very linear -- and this means the midtone colors are brighter than they should be. If you bump saturation without fixing the midtones, all you'll get is cartoonish colors that look like a trip to Candyland on poppies.

Maybe even go a 1/3 stop down and depending on the color because they reflect differently. The part about getting the density and contrast the Dr is talking about is right on. Its one of the first things you learn when you print color is density then color balance. Contrast and saturation was something controlled with film not at the printing stage. But test you won't regret it. Every shutter and every aperture is made with a tolerance. If you test you will know.

Hi Rich,

I did a quick search because I remembered that Wilt uses sometihng called the Macbeth Color Checker.

There are a ton of search results but here is one with the item for sale and some descriptive text. I didn't read it thoroughly. The same item is sold at Amazon and more than likely B&H has it.
There are tons of articles about its use and how it helps analyze color.

http://www.filmtools.c​om/maccol.html

airfrogusmc wrote in post #3389119
Contrast and saturation was something controlled with film not at the printing stage.

I think the principle is pretty much the same whether one shoots film or digital. Film, of course, has an inherent S-shaped exposure-response curve, whereas digital is linear and the S-curve needs to be imposed post-capture with curves and levels. Negative film has a much flatter curve compared with slides, which allows contrast to be controlled much more precisely in printing, whereas slides are much more of a finished product when they come out.

You still need to underexpose film when you want to really enrich colors. This is particularly true of sunsets. I shot this in New Zealand on Kodak Gold back in 1994 when I was studying abroad there, and I think I underexposed it by 3 or 4 stops.

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The gamma is much steeper with trans films than with most neg films and of course that will change from film to film. Digital is much closer in shoulder parts of the curve to trans film than neg film. With color neg it good to expose as close to the threshold of exposure as you can get. First sign of density over film base + fog. I know allot of guys that always over exposed color neg film but not me. Under exposing color neg film is not all that wise cause usually there is not much latitude down but quite a bit of latitude up.

TMR Design wrote in post #3389193
Hi Rich,

I did a quick search because I remembered that Wilt uses sometihng called the Macbeth Color Checker.

There are a ton of search results but here is one with the item for sale and some descriptive text. I didn't read it thoroughly. The same item is sold at Amazon and more than likely B&H has it.
There are tons of articles about its use and how it helps analyze color.

http://www.filmtools.c​om/maccol.html

There ya go Thanks Robert...Then take that puppy out and shoot it at the metered exposure then go a stop under in third stop steps and then a stop over in third steps and see which gives you the most saturation. Make sure you test it in all the different light situations and then you'll know for sure.

Actually, with digital the advice is generally to "expose to the right," in other words to expose as bright as you can (the right side of the histogram) without losing highlight detail. Because of the way digital sensors function, 50% of the color depth is in the right 25% of the histogram. To purposely underexpose is to lose color depth. Yes, your jpegs look more saturated on the screen, but you can get that back in post processing with the techniques described above, and with others. You can't, however, get back color that isn't there because you deliberately underexposed. Michael Reichman and others have done some extensive explanations of this.

Greg