ETTR in 2023

[eddystone]

Is this still relevant? Back in the first decade of this century, Michael Reichmann (Luminous Landscape) was an advocate but maybe the characteristics of digital sensors and the processing hardware/software have moved on.

 

[MartinN]

What I know, it is existential to digital imaging. It inherent to binary processing and representation of measured light by sensors, equal in ccd and cmos, up today. However, you don’t want blown up deatails.

 

[pegelli]

The way I look at it is that the first and most important thing you need to watch with digital is to avoid blown highlights.
After that if you have room on aperture and/or exposure time giving the sensor the maximum amount of light and staying at base ISO will usually achieve the best DR and least noise and put the highlights to the right edge (but not over) of the histogram.
However if you have to raise ISO to achieve ETTR (because you can't open your aperture further or increase the exposure time) you might as well underexpose and raise the exposure in your raw converter.

 

[GrahamWelland]

My mantra these days is never to blow out the highlights, and if you're one or two stops underexposed, current sensors and processing can make it irrelevant.

That's how I shoot my monochrome cameras, which have no highlight support at all. Colour sensors at least can normally recover blown highlights via at least a couple of channels at the expense of a colour shift.

In 2022, 2023+ shadow recovery is quite remarkable.

 

[algrove]

All of above has merit.

One important caveat for color work is that if you do not have an RGB histogram, but only an average histogram of all the colors it is possible to blow out one color (usually red) without knowing it. That is why an RGB and an averaged histogram (usually displayed as grey) is so important. To this day I wonder why the Leica M11 only has an averaged histogram. Fuji actually does better at displaying histograms (3 colors plus one average) versus Leica.

 

[dj may]

If there are strong colors in the red area, I expose less than the light meter indicates, to avoid overexposure. Sometimes I compensate by up to two stops. This is not underexposure; it is the correct exposure for the red channel. As in many situations, one has to choose a trade-off for what is most important for the intended result.

Most of my work is black and white.

 

[pegelli]

Fuji actually does better at displaying histograms (3 colors plus one average) versus Leica.

My Sony's are the same in that respect, they also display 4 histograms. My Leica M246Monochrom only one, but that makes sense

 

[algrove]

For the Leica I meant color Leica and now the M11.

 

[Godfrey]

In complete disregard of ETTR, I spend a little bit of time the other day exposing ATWTTL (all the way to the left) in order to see what forcing the M10-M to produce a grainy/noisy image might be like. I found that I can get a nice grainy image at ISO 800 by setting exposure to about 4 stops under what the meter suggests as correct and then ramping up the Exposure setting in LR Classic, and the M10M noise is actually fairly pleasant to look at.

ETTR ... eh, I just make my best guess and work it in LR Classic. If it sucks, I discard the exposure. Exposing anything to the point of clipping in highlights where detail is required is an automatic discard.

G