Your camera’s matrix or evaluative meter is fine when time is tight and the light is soft but, however sophisticated that meter might be, to rely on it completely is to leave things to chance. When it really matters, you need to take complete control of exposure—the improvements can be dramatic. We’ll show you how, choosing where to place shadows and highlights in the image instead of having your camera take its best guess at what you’re photographing. Doing this for digital capture is not the same as it was for film—you need to be more protective of highlights and less worried about shadows.

Start well—optimise your exposures

Optimal exposures give you the most robust images—that means more room to manoeuvre in post-production if you intend to work heavily on the look of an photograph. Just as importantly, it means less time attempting to correct things if you’re looking for a straight interpretation of a scene.

End the guessing game

Overexposed skies, unexpectedly blown highlights when photographing white clothing, blocked-up shadows and under-exposed faces that become noisy when corrected… do these things sound familiar? The answer isn’t as simple as “expose to the right”, and the camera’s three-colour histograms are less useful than they might initially seem!

Once you have your camera set up to display genuinely useful histogram information and you take complete control of your metering, you’ll have a new command over your photographing process and it’s very liberating—no more nasty surprises after you transfer your photographs to your profiled computer display.

The Shoot Raw blog

For a steady stream of tips on all these topics and more, take a look at the blog. You can subscribe to it by e-mail (Google’s Feedburner service) or by RSS. Both options are free and allow you receive all the new content as soon as it’s published.

Lightroom courses in London

We provide patient, expert tuition and training on all these subjects—see our training page for Lightroom courses in London and the South East.