How do you prevent underexposure/overexposure?

Question

Or do you just fix it later in photoshop?

Answer 1

Bethany;

Over or under exposure is something you learn how to overcome BEFORE you push the shutter button. This is where experience and learning your craft come in.

With practice you will learn when your camera will over/under expose, and how to compensate.

If you are shooting in Jpg mode you can only fix things a little. If you are shooting RAW mode, there is much more room to fix it up.

But there still is nothing better than exposing correctly to start with.

Answer 2

Oh man, do you ever need to follow this discussion:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071023172700AAeF8Qx&r=w#QcYvXTPoBzJbHwGQRPpEMiEuf4oRXTQLxBFKf6yeHQiiq3.igf9r

If you overexpose, the highlights are blown out and gone forever. There is no such thing as recovering a blown highlight in photoshop. If you underexpose, you can sometimes pull a useable image out of the shadows, but at the expense of digital noise. When you try to eliminate the noise, you also eliminate any sharpness that you might have had.

This may sound trite, but if you are not able to figure this out as part of your own adventure, please find a helpful friend with some knowledge to share or take a course in photography or join a camera club.

Getting it right - or darn close to right - in the camera will go much farther towards having a good final result than if you count on "fixing it later" in Photoshop.

~~~

What the heck. I just posted this link to show how it can be done without Photoshop. http://www.flickr.com/photos/samfeinstein/tags/nophotoshop/ When I say, "NoPhotoshop," I admit that up to 50% sharpening has been allowed for this tag, but I have done no sharpening in the camera. If I altered levels, contrast or saturation, that disqualified the image from this tag. If I cropped an image, or if I cloned out dust or fingerprints from a scan, I did not consider that to be "alteration" in Photoshop and left it in the group. Some are very boring snapshots, but some are images that I am proud to show. At least 95 out of the 100 have the correct exposure.

Answer 3

By carefully considering the lighting conditions and placement of your subjects BEFORE the shot. No amount of time in Photoshop is worth the few moments of doing all one can to take a good exposure, at the source.

Even then, a good photographer will try to take several shots of the same subject by "bracketing" his shots. Take a shot or two over and under the probable exposure settings. It is kind of a "shotgun" technique of assuring that, at least, one of the shots is correctly exposed.

A good shot will consider what part of the image is most important, and, expose THAT to its best advantage.

After the shot is done, and a reshoot is not possible, then we might bring it into Photoshop to tweak the image.

Answer 4

If you seen a strong sunlight like morning at 10am to afternoon 3pm,it will be overexposure, you have to close down the aperture at f/19, If you taken underexposure like Resident,studio,church,etc,then you need to open aperture at f/8,two times of the exposures or you must use flashlight ,if you think so troublesome to use flashlight ,then you need to switch your film speed to ISO 1000 , using tripod to support your camera without shaking your camera.

Answer 5

You need to read and study the Owner's Manual for your camera. The first step to good photography is learning how to use your camera.

Answer 6

i do it by reading the reflected light off my palm and adding a stop, you could buy and use a grey card

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