What if you can't shoot RAW?

[vsa]

Just to recap:

• Expose to the right (meaning the histogram... don't clip the highlights, at least by a lot)
• Get white balance right in the camera, or as close as possible.
• If you need to edit the picture more than once, save as psd or tiff (to preserve the layers)
• Save up for a camera with raw capabilities (in which case you don't need to worry about white balance as much, but should get it right anyways... and after that figure out Lightroom or Aperture)

[inkista]

Originally Posted by johnnycombermere

lol, thanks everyone
by the way, i read somewhere that you get more information in your pictures if you overexpose them slightly instead of underexpose them. does anyone know if that's true of jpegs as well?

Depends on who you read.

The Online Photographer: 'Expose to the Right' is a Bunch of Bull

The "expose to the right" thing isn't so much about getting "more information", as it is about reducing noise. On the flip side of the argument:

http://www.guillermoluijk.com/articl...e/index_en.htm

[jdepould]

With JPEGs, you just have to make sure you're capturing good, clean pixels on the front end. That means good, methodical shooting technique, low ISO, tripod where appropriate.

I'd also recommend setting your picture profiles as neutral as possible (low contrast, saturation, sharpness), so that your image will be as flexible as possible when you bring it in to the computer. I shoot video that way to give me more flexibility with color correction (very few cameras shoot raw video). It looks like crap straight out of the camera, but after grading it's really nice.

[ravncat]

Originally Posted by johnnycombermere

lol, thanks everyone
by the way, i read somewhere that you get more information in your pictures if you overexpose them slightly instead of underexpose them. does anyone know if that's true of jpegs as well?

ETTR (Expose to the Right) is a raw technique. It helps you get more tonal information which you can play with afterwards in editing, and it helps really reduce noise in the shadows. ETTR really only works when the range you want to capture is less than the dynamic range of the camera. This is pretty imperative, you want to keep important highlights, and sometimes that makes ETTR impossible. (There are also some issues with color hues (and the way colors "change" at different exposure - this is a bigger problem for JPG because often cameras use color profiles that are hue twisted. Hue Twists - it gets pretty technical)

In JPG the theory itself holds, but in practice it's not quite as useful - unless you really don't want shadow noise and you're willing to deal with posterization or not being able to push the file far in editing) So in JPG you still get more tonal information in the highlights, due to the nature of the math, BUT Your dynamic range across the 8 bit file is "smaller" and "compressed" from your original image because you're throwing away alot of tonal information in JPG - going from 12 or 14 bits to 8. This means that when you normalize your image afterwards - you're going to do a pretty large "stretch" of the higher tones across the image - the 8 bits tends to struggle with that, but not always. Many times you're better off Getting exposure as accurately as you can in JPG - but if you err, it's better to err on the side of slight overexposure.

For JPG, if you came from film, treat JPG like slide film - get everything captured as accurately as you can. The most Critical are White Balance and Exposure. It's hard to color correct a JPG for incorrect white balance, often because of those hue twists I mentioned.

If you do want a trick to "color correct" in photoshop that's good if you didn't miss by alot - go to curves and...

Click the "show clipping option' in curves -
Click the white (rightmost of three) eye droppers next to "show clipping"
Then drag the right white triangle slider to the left a little, your image should look black, as white/yellow/blue shows up on the screen,
click there, try and get the white to a small but existing area

Repeat the process with the "black" eyedropper tool.

When you finish turn show clipping off, and toggle the preview selection to see the change. If you're eye is good, you can skip show clipping and click on what part of the image should be black shadow and what part should be neutral white highlight. This does a pretty good job, most of, but not all the time.