Thomas Pitera Photography

With the metering systems in today’s digital cameras becoming more and more sophisticated, people often wonder if hand-held meters are necessary. This quick tutorial is designed to show why using a hand-held meter would be beneficial.

Camera Meters (Reflected)

Most of today’s camera meters give you three options of evaluating the scene (Matrix/Evaluative, Center-Weighted Average and Spot). Anyone who has played around with these metering types will find that even though they provide pretty good results, they can easily be fooled. The reason an in-camera meter can easily be fooled is it reads reflected light and is designed to “see” everything as a neutral gray. This works well if you have an even amount of light, dark and middle tones in the scene but not so great if there is a bias towards bright or dark tones. This is easy to overcome once you familiarize yourself with how your camera reacts in situations – but frustrating none the less.

Hand-Held Meters (Incident)

The biggest benefit of a hand-held meter is the ability to read incident light. What this means is the meter reads the light falling on the subject instead of what is reflecting back to the camera. This means you’ll get the same reading regardless of what color or range of tones the scene contains.

Sometimes you can’t walk over to your subject for an incident reading so most hand-held meters also allow you to read reflected light as well, including spot metering. Some of the more sophisticated meters will allow you to take multiple readings and average those values, which is great for complex scenes.

Reflected vs. Incident Metering

Below is a perfect example of the benefit of a hand-held meter. This scene was shot with two 100w modeling lights, both placed 45 degrees from the subject, bounced into umbrellas. The first image was shot with the Matrix Metering function, the second with the Sekonic L-358 Light Meter.

Left: Nikon D200 Matrix Metering / Right: Sekonic L-358 Incident Metering

You’ll notice there’s about a two-stop difference between the scenes! The problem here is the reflected meter sees our white background as a middle gray. The result is an under-exposed picture. The opposite would have happened if we had shot the same subject on a black background: an over-exposed picture. Since the hand-held meter is measuring the light falling on the subject, it ignores the tone of the background.

Alternatives

If a light-meter isn’t in your budget, a cheap alternative would be a gray card. Since your subject meters off of a neutral gray, you would place the gray card in front of your subject, fill the scene with the card, then take your reading. This should result in a neutral reading with your highlights and shadows falling where they should be.

Hopefully this gives you an idea of the benefits of both types of metering. Good luck shooting!

People often get frustrated when they take a picture and the color does not represent what they saw. A prime example is when you take a picture indoors that has a strong yellow/orange cast. Or perhaps when you take a picture of a gorgeous orange sunset but the photo comes out with a blue tint. Understanding what white balance is and how to use it can help you in any of these situations.

What is White Balance?

To put it simply, white balance tells the camera exactly what the color temperature of white is in degrees kelvin (K). Going back to 35mm days, most film was rated at “daylight,” which is about 5200-5500K. If you shot under a lighting condition other than daylight, then you would need to get a correction filter (unless of course you bought tungsten film). White balance eliminates the need for these filters by being able to tell your camera’s sensor what the white point is. The common color temperatures in photography range from about 3200K (orange) to 7500K (blue).

What About Auto White Balance?

Auto white balance (AWB) does a pretty good job in a lot of cases and continues to improve considerably with each new generation of digital cameras. The biggest problem with AWB is it can easily be fooled and overcompensate for a particular light source. This leaves you with an image that might be close to what you want but not perfect. The best way to describe the difference between AWB and preset WB: AWB gets you in the ballpark while preset WB puts you on the pitcher’s mound.

How Preset White Balance Works

The way a preset WB works is it adds the opposite color to make the light source appear white. This table breaks down the type of light source, its color temperature, what that light source will look like compared to daylight, and what color is added when using that WB.

*Fluorescent light tends to vary based on the type of bulb being used. Most fluorescent light does not fall into the traditional photo color temperature range as it has a strong green cast. Certain daylight or warm balance fluorescent lights fall around 4000-4500K.

Using Preset White Balance to Add Warmth

A common practice for scenic shots is to shoot the WB slightly warmer than the actual light you are in. For example: When I’m outdoors, I often times use the cloudy WB over the daylight WB to add a little extra warmth to the image. There are some situations where you intentionally have to shoot the image at a warmer WB to have the light reflect what you saw. Below is the same image with three different WB settings: the first daylight, the second cloudy, and the third shade.

Daylight WB

Cloudy WB

Shade WB

I really like all three images, but the second is much more representative of what I actually saw. The first one is a little too cool while the third is much too warm. Now in certain situations, you might want to have a warmer or cooler look so hopefully these three shots illustrate that in some shots the right WB setting is the one that you want personally.

If you’ve read the DSLR Buying Guide, you’ll remember I said the “RAW vs JPEG” question could take up an entire article. Well, here it is! This article is a basic overview of the main differences as well as the pros and cons of each file format.

JPEG

If you’ve taken a digital picture, you are probably familiar with a JPEG. It is pretty much the “standard” file format for most digital imaging. Even if you shoot a RAW image, once you’ve processed the image you’ll probably convert it to a JPEG.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of shooting JPEG is the varying image quality and size compressions. If your only plans for the photos were to post them to the web or play them back in a video slideshow, you would probably be fine shooting at a lower image quality. Or perhaps you never print larger than a 4×6 print. In that case, you’d probably be better off with a medium image size. The main advantage here is if you don’t need the higher image quality, you can get more images on your storage card.

The biggest drawback to a JPEG file is that it’s what’s known as a “lossy format.” Essentially, this means if you start doing a lot of image manipulation and re-saving over the original file, you will eventually start to see a degradation in quality. Also, you lose some information when you try to “fix” certain things. Here’s an example:

Photoshop Autolevels: Before and After

The image on the left is the original. Notice that it is slightly underexposed and has somewhat of a blue cast to it. The main thing to look at on the histogram is that even though it doesn’t extend all the way to the right into the highlight region, the levels are even.

The image on the right is after using the “Auto-levels” function in Photoshop. The image looks much better and the histogram extends through the entire input range, but you’ll notice it almost looks like it’s been brushed over by a rake. The portions where there are white lines are sections of the image where there is no data, or the program is “making it up.” Now this won’t really affect you in smaller prints or applications for the web, but this can be problematic when trying to make large prints.

RAW

A RAW image is the unprocessed data from your camera’s sensor. RAW images are generally uncompressed or have very little compression. Every manufacturer has its own proprietary RAW file format (.nef, .cr2, .orf, etc.) that generally encrypts some file information (more on that later).

The biggest advantage to shooting RAW is you have much more control of your camera settings including white balance, saturation, hue, contrast and sharpening after you’ve shot the image. With most RAW editors, you never make these changes to your original image. Generally the changes you make are applied to the original image as a “develop” setting once you export the image to a JPEG or TIFF. If you aren’t happy with the changes you’ve made, you can always go back to the original data.

Also, since a RAW image is not usually set to a particular color space yet, you are able to pull out or recover more information from lost shadows or highlights. Here’s an example similar to what we did with the JPEG:

RAW Processing: Before and After

Once again, the left image is the original. I intentionally shot it underexposed and forgot to change the white balance to match the light setting I was in. The right image is after making some adjustments in Lightroom to the exposure, brightness, contrast and saturation. The result is what I wanted the picture to look like, had I shot it properly to begin with. The important thing to note here is that the histogram is not “raked” at all. This has a lot to do with the fact that I’m working with a 12-bit uncompressed file versus an 8-bit compressed file (JPEG).

The biggest drawback to shooting RAW is file size. You can expect to get about half as many RAW images on a card compared with JPEG images (it will be even less if you are shooting something like 14-bit uncompressed). Because you are working with larger files, you also need more memory to edit the files.

The other drawback to RAW files is you have to edit them before you can really do anything with the file. To open and edit/convert RAW files, you need a specific software program to do so. Most manufacturers provide a RAW converter with their cameras, but these often provide only very basic controls. The biggest advantage to using the OEM’s RAW converter is it’s able to read encrypted metadata that third-party converters don’t have access to, including your camera’s settings for color, noise reduction, sharpening and other image processing parameters. Third-party RAW convertors generally give you more control overall but aren’t able to read your camera settings and provide their own “default” conversion. This can be frustrating for first-time users, but once you develop your own workflow, you can create your own develop settings or ones that mimic the manufacturer’s settings.

What about shooting RAW + JPEG?

Most DSLRs today give you the option to shoot both a RAW and JPEG image simultaneously. This can be useful for first time RAW shooters so they at least have a “backup” file in case they decide they don’t want to go through the process. It can also give you a good reference if you are trying to set up your third-party processing software to match the color parameters of your camera. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend doing this on a regular basis since it takes up a considerable amount of space. The other thing to keep in mind is if you shoot a RAW image and simply want to retain the camera processing settings the way you shot the image, all you have to do is run it through the OEM’s RAW converter. By converting the files this way, you’d produce the same result as a camera-processed JPEG.

Conclusion

Both RAW and JPEG images provide benefits. You can get a lot more images per card with JPEGs, but you end up with more compressed data for post-processing. A RAW image does give you more data to work with but takes up a lot more space and requires more work to get the final result. Either way, both formats have their equal place in digital photography.