Do you tend to under or over expose your photos? | Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips

I use Lightroom for my RAW conversions and image editing. Since the first version of Lightroom I've come to trust the RAW conversion to get it right - and it does. No matter what I throw at it, Lightroom creates the right balance between highlights and shadows, sharpness and color saturation for my Olympus cameras. I'm not trying to recreate the "punch" of a JPEG. I want a softer palette. I want the final image to have "my mark". Olympus cameras don't have quite the dynamic range of other high end digital cameras. Close - but not quite - and certainly not enough for me to consider other cameras.

This is a great article. I know my E-510 at ISO 100 tends to be more like ISO 125. Depending on the lighting I tend to go under by about 1/3 stop in full sun. The E-P1 has a bit of a broader dynamic range and ISO 100 seems to be more spot on. The E-510 creates images that are a bit more saturated and rich with a tick of underexposure.

The thing is it's really more about my style of shooting. I tend to let the shadows go black in some images as part of the composition. I want the saturation and highlight detail to hold. "Noise" is not an issue - Lightroom takes care of that. I can't remember the last time I actually saw "noise" unless I deliberately provoked it. (Sunset, aiming towards the sun, -2EV - but this was for a dramatic effect and easily corrected.)

JPEG is a whole other matter. It's not that the Olympus cameras don't create great JPEG's. It's just that I find them more sensitive to tinker with. There's less data to work with. RAW may be a slower workflow and create larger files but it's more "digital darkroom to me. My Slide (smartphone camera) creates nice JPEG's but they're a tick more processed than I'd like. Lightroom handles these images well.

In the end, photography is as much as about art as it is about science, maybe a little alchemy and magic, too. The more we learn about techniques the more we make them our own.

Do you tend to under or over expose your photos? | Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips