Don't Expose to the Right
Exposing to the Right Is Wrong; An Old Wive's Tale Best Forgotten
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"Expose to the Right" was an old wive’s tale from the 2000s back when digital camera sensors were really bad and noisy. People were misled to thinking the best exposure was one where the right-side of the histogram got as far to the right (100% white) as possible without actually touching that edge.
We did all we could to try to reduce noise, and using as much exposure as possible was one way to combat this. "Expose to the right" was something cooked up in chatroomdom that never actually worked, but impressed the innocent.
It often leads to blown-out colors — but newcomers to digital (who were everyone back then) were intrigued by this odd "histogram" curve and wanted somehow to master it.
"Exposing to the right" has nothing to do with proper exposure. Among the many reasons to avoid it are:
1.) Small, bright highlights often aren't visible in a histogram since they represent so few pixels by percentage. Even something one-tenth of the image wide and one-tenth of the image tall (a pretty big area) represents only 1% of the total pixel count. Therefore it's easy to blow-out small areas with this technique since you may not see them in the histogram.
2.) It leads to washed-out colors if you use only one “brightness” curve for your histogram.
A single "luminance" or "brightness" histogram ignores the fact that one of the three color channels will be stronger than the others in every color image — but will not be seen if you use but one histogram curve!
You will be obliterating that color (losing saturation) if you "expose to the right" because a single monochrome “brightness” curve is blind to any color or saturation!
It is critical always to use a color RGB histogram, never a “brightness” or single one, as the "Brightness" curve is only useful for B&W shooting as it ignores colors — duh.
3.) Even if you use a proper color RGB histogram and don't miss anything, "exposing to the right" often leads to ugly overexposures which need to be darkened later to look right.
We have to expose so it looks good, and that's it. This is an art; there are no easy shortcuts. "Exposing to the right" may often lead to overexposure, which looks bad and requires extra steps to try to correct it after being shot.
HINT: Always shoot at the lowest possible ISO. This ensures the least noise (duh), and what many folks don't realize is that even shooting JPG as I do that one always can increase the exposure either overall or just in the shadows later in editing. Most tools people use with raw files, Like Adobe Camera Raw, work the same with the JPG files I prefer, try it!
Shooting at the lowest possible ISO ensures the cleanest possible image from which we later can extract whatever we need.
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