Low ISO

ISO 160 not 200 but that is splitting hairs at 1/3 stop.

I did mention ISO 160 about 6 posts back
It seems that the Highlight protection underexposes by 1 stop
which isn't a bad idea anyway, you can easily lift it in PP and
if you do burn out the highlights they can't be recovered.

After a bit more research it does seem that the Highlight/Shadow
protection is applied to the in camera JPG's and that the
Pentax computer software can apply it to the RAW files.

As long as you underexpose any bright highlights shadow detail
can be recovered from RAW's in PP without shadow or highlight
protection. It's hardly worth bothering too much about dynamic
range because a monitor only shows about 8.5 stops anyway. Any
extra noise in the shadows at 200ISO won't be very visible.

This is a good but boring 3 video demonstration...

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[quote:3496ace15f="Algernon]
It seems that the Highlight protection underexposes by 1 stop
which isn't a bad idea anyway, you can easily lift it in PP and
if you do burn out the highlights they can't be recovered.
...
As long as you underexpose any bright highlights shadow detail
can be recovered from RAW's in PP without shadow or highlight
protection. It's hardly worth bothering too much about dynamic
range because a monitor only shows about 8.5 stops anyway. Any
extra noise in the shadows at 200ISO won't be very visible.
[/quote]Actually it's a terrible idea, by underexposing you are throwing away dynamic range and shadow detail. It is also possible to recover burned out highlights to some extent but there is still no substitute for correct exposure. As soon as you have a subject with extended tonal range to capture, or you wish to show detail in the shadows you are fighting for every bit of dynamic range you can get.

Best advice is probably to just expose normally and accurately as countless generations of photographers have done. For those who want to optimise results in the digital world, and are willing to pay the somewhat heavy price of having every photograph looking totally overexposed until post processed, the best way is to shoot in raw and overexpose every shot as much as possible without burning out highlights. Maximum image information with minimum noise is then available for use.

That's not the usual advice, but it is something I've read or heard somewhere before. I can't remember where - it may have been one of B & H's online presentations - but it was from a well respected source. And I have to say it does make a lot of sense when I think about it.

LINK

John

The expose to the right concept is based on the notion that more information is available in the brighter areas of the hsitogram.

Maybe so, but given that over-exposure kills digital images just like it killed colour slides, then under-exposing is better than over-exposing.

It's one of those situations where the rule of thumb is more helpful in practice than the theory.

"Exposing to the right" will indeed maximise the dynamic range and gwing is 100% correct with the following

But given you can recover 5 stops fro a K-5 there's no real need for most applications. The ETTR was more applicable to earlier digital sensors which had limited dynamic range in comparison.

If there's a danger of blowing highlights ( Clipping ) then I'll always tend to underexpose to be on the safe side

Well yes, and no

Over exposure only kills the image if you blow highlights. If you overexpose as far as possible without blowing highlights you don't kill the image you do quite the opposite, in fact it is unbelievably significant and every extra stop of exposure you can get into the image doubles the amount of available information for tonal resolution.

While the image isn't killed what you have though is an information rich potentially superior quality image that is totally unusable until you remap the tones to something realistic and back to normal overall exposure. Doing this is far too much faff for general use though (in my opinion) and as has been said those fortunate enough to use the K5 have sufficient dynamic range available they can, for almost all shots, follow my actual recommendation of just exposing accurately and normally.

The 'expose to the right technique' is great, but I think probably not actually needed unless you are going to be brightening shadows (and want to avoid HDR). Ironically it doesn't help with truly wide contrast scenes as for those you are going to be probably both losing shadow detail and blowing out highlights at the same time and trying to balance out those two evils i.e. you have no more exposure available to use. As sensors become better the need for this technique decreases, but ironically the percentage of shots where you can take advantage of it increases.