exposing for yellow?

Does lots of yellow require a bit of exposure compensation, from a middle needle reading, similar to lots of white?

I don't shoot very yellow subjects often, but reflecting on my results they seem to get under exposed. And I mostly shoot film so getting the exposure right does matter especially when shooting slide film.

I know my Canon film SLRs will need EC + 2 1/3 for a mainly white scene so maybe yellow requires about EC +1? Any thoughts?

I don't have any direct experience shooting yellow, but my suggestion would be to use the histogram to help with the exposure.

Other then the 7D whose metering does factor in color data, exposure meters are color blind. But yellow is a light color, tonally lighter than medium grey, so if I were spot metering off a yellow object I would compensate for that difference just as I would for any other light color, a blue sky for instance.

There is another problem in digital photography that I was reminded of just yesterday when an acquaintance showed me his photos of yellow flowers. The petals were all lacking details because of red channel clipping. Yellow is roughly equal parts of red and green with minimal or no blue. When daylight white balance is applied the red channel capture values are doubled. Thus, what was maybe 180/180/10 before white balance (the dark foliage background pushed the exposure up) becomes 255/180/14. In this case it is neccessary to underexpose the yellow flower rather than compensating upwards.

1. Yellows are highly saturated so some compensation might be needed.
2. But you say, "they seem to get under exposed." So you should get a gray card & shoot on "M" if you want to get the exposure you need right on. You wouldn't need to carry it all the time if you interpolated it's reading as I do for digital:
Need an exposure crutch?
I used to shoot 60-80 rolls of transparencies a day, & you'll find that it works very well for film.

Why "M"? Post #47

Grey Card who uses one and which one ??

tzalman wrote in post #9215751
Other then the 7D whose metering does factor in color data, exposure meters are color blind. But yellow is a light color, tonally lighter than medium grey, so if I were spot metering off a yellow object I would compensate for that difference just as I would for any other light color, a blue sky for instance.

There is another problem in digital photography that I was reminded of just yesterday when an acquaintance showed me his photos of yellow flowers. The petals were all lacking details because of red channel clipping. Yellow is roughly equal parts of red and green with minimal or no blue. When daylight white balance is applied the red channel capture values are doubled. Thus, what was maybe 180/180/10 before white balance (the dark foliage background pushed the exposure up) becomes 255/180/14. In this case it is neccessary to underexpose the yellow flower rather than compensating upwards.

+999999999

This will give you an idea of relative brightness of the color patches of the MacBeth Color Checker. Note that the Yellow sample is about 1.5EV brighter than 18% gray card.

Wilt wrote in post #9217019
This will give you an idea of relative brightness of the color patches of the MacBeth Color Checker. Note that the Yellow sample is about 1.5EV brighter than 18% gray card.

Please note that this example does not try to accurately render the color card which serves only as a background to the white text which I inserted.

Excellent graphic! I'm a very visual person so something like this that illustrates exposing for colors is wonderful! Thanks a bunch.

White balance had a huge part to play with a wedding reception I did this a few months ago. I had it set to AWB but with the lighting it really threw off my camera. the pictures were quite warm and yellow (fixed in RAW) but they were underexposed a good stop as well. Now I realize that RAW isn't everything and trying to get accurate WB is important!

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DStanic wrote in post #9229272
I had it set to AWB but with the lighting it really threw off my camera. the pictures were quite warm and yellow (fixed in RAW) but they were underexposed a good stop as well.

Indoor incandescent lighting need at least EC +2/3 as you've found out because it fools your exposure meter. You can't shoot for no blown highlights (without flash) because the lights themselves will tell your camera that is a lot of light themselves. So you really need to see where the majority of the light is capture lies on your histogram.

I don't shoot indoors without a flash using film so that's not related to my original question.