“Expose to the right” or “Expose it right”
“Expose to the right” or “ETTR”, has been preach(over hyped IMO) by many as the best method for digital photography. I am not sure if I can agree with that.
ETTR’s main premise is that you can pull back the highlight in raw while capturing the details in the shadows. Well, IMHO, that usually results in flat images that has no visual depth. Not only that because you are overexposing some elements, tones, color, and detail might also be affected. This might also result in extra post processing time.
Back in the days of slide film (Velvia was my favorite), I would exposed for the subject/light that I choocse to and let the rest fall as they may. This created some wonderful images with depth and very nice tonality. I have been taking the same approach with my Foveon based camera as well. IMNSHO, it created much better images than ETTR.
By practicing EIR, I am able to output my images a great percentage of time at default setting (all zero) and get what I want by applying a simple curve adjustment. Amazingly, there are times where the images will work nicely as it is. The following photos(SD10) has no post processing applied:
Here’s a gallery with comparisons. (I will located the originals and upload then again.)
http://www.pbase.com/chunsum/zero-vs-others
ETTR can be useful at times when you want to save time when shooting and spend the time in post. But for me, there is nothing better than to see my images the way I wanted (or almost) when I bring it up in SPP or LR. Give it a try, you might just agree with me.