topic Re: Photographing Art Underexposed in EOS DSLR & Mirrorless Cameras

EOS M50 Mark II Art Photographs Underexposed

DennisMerritt — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 13:09:08 GMT

I'm photographing a friend's paintings and having a really hard time with exposure. I have an EOS M50 Mark II. I've tried all sorts of experiments, none have worked. For the purpose of this post I'll consider just one. I have a painting sitting in indirect sunlight near a window. I'm using P, evaluative metering, filters off, auto lighting off (disabled), picture style standard 4,2,4,0,0,0, white balance AWB-W 0,0. The shot was f/5.0, 1/60, iso 320. Brightness +/- 0. The picture comes out dark and I need photoshop to bring it to life. Here's the rub. I take a picture with my iPhone and it comes out perfect. Any help greatly appreciated. (I've had trouble with exposure in other contexts as well and wind up setting brightness high, but for this shot increasing brightness takes away the subtle colors of the rose) Here's the two shots: iPhone photoM50 (reduced size to upload)

Re: Photographing Art Underexposed

kvbarkley — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 17:21:20 GMT

Get a grey card, like a whibal, and spot expose on it. You can use it for color balance, too.

Re: Photographing Art Underexposed

deebatman316 — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 18:14:33 GMT

Or I was thinking adding Exposure Compensation (EC) to see what would happen.

Re: Photographing Art Underexposed

DennisMerritt — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 21:04:13 GMT

Thanks. My problem with this was I could get the picture bright enough, but it washed out all the subtle color changes of the original painting.

Re: Photographing Art Underexposed

DennisMerritt — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 21:05:38 GMT

Thanks. I ordered one. But not sure how to use it when I get it.

Re: Photographing Art Underexposed

deebatman316 — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 21:10:42 GMT

Did you use flash with the iPhone picture. How much exposure compensation did you add on.

Re: Photographing Art Underexposed

FloridaDrafter — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 21:23:57 GMT

Hello, Dennis, and welcome to the forum!

Here is a screen shot of a comparison of the EXIF data from both shots. Hopefully you can see why the iPhone image is better in this situation. Compare aperture, shutter, and ISO. The phone was able to have a very wide aperture of f/1.5 (more light) vs f/5 (less light). The best you can do with the 18-150 is shoot closer to 18mm to get f/3.5 (more light), but I am not familiar with how the M50 II works with the EF-M 18-150mm f/3.5-6.3, that is, how it handles the wide angle lens correction.

You can either try increasing exposure compensation as Demetrius suggested, or add more light. I prefer more light, but that's not always possible. Since you mentioned picture style settings, I'll assume you are capturing JPeG. Try capturing in Raw and you will have more control in post to adjust exposure. If you don't have a dedicated Canon Raw editor, download DPP 4. It's not the most robust, but it handles Canon Raw the best and will export to PS. If you go that route, be sure to load correction data for your lens. It's a feature in DPP so just click it and select your lens from the list.

Newton

Re: Photographing Art Underexposed

DennisMerritt — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 02:33:24 GMT

Thanks! That explains a lot. And light, yes, in full sun we can get it right, but we don't want to lay the paintings out in the snow... Thanks again

Re: Photographing Art Underexposed

kvbarkley — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 03:48:28 GMT

AT one time they had a good article on how to use it.

Re: Photographing Art Underexposed

DennisMerritt — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 13:06:51 GMT

no flash, and had used up to +2, lots of experiments. lots of experiments with lighting which all still had underexposed images. the pictures I shared were taken with natural indirect light on a sunny winter's day

Re: Photographing Art Underexposed

deebatman316 — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 13:18:07 GMT

What kind of lighting did you try using. What looks bright to us is dark to the camera.

Re: EOS M50 Mark II Art Photographs Underexposed

DennisMerritt — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 13:33:52 GMT

What I don't understand is why the camera didn't adjust the shutter speed down to get the proper exposure. I've since been playing with M mode and f/3.5 (as you suggest) and slowing the speed, and I can get more light and again, get the details washed out of the picture. What's the difference between exposure compensation and pushing the shutter speed down? (I can use a tripod as the art isn't going anyway.)

Re: Photographing Art Underexposed

DennisMerritt — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 13:36:27 GMT

I've got a couple of bright photography lights I used for the lighting experiments. No joy.

Re: Photographing Art Underexposed

DennisMerritt — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 13:39:44 GMT

Right, it looks dark to the camera, but why did the iPhone see it like I do? It "knew" what exposure to use to take a perfect picture. (It's annoying how good the phone camera is. I don't want to shoot my friend's art with an iPhone when they came to me because I had a fancy camera.)

Re: Photographing Art Underexposed

deebatman316 — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 14:11:21 GMT

Your camera sees things in gray. So any very bright colors will fool the metering system. Then cause it to underexpose. Your phone works differently it meters with color. That’s Color Matrix metering. Canon doesn’t use this.

Re: EOS M50 Mark II Art Photographs Underexposed

kvbarkley — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 14:22:52 GMT

Exposure compensation can adjust shutter speed, Aperture or ISO. If you have a particular reason to fix any of those, it is best to do it yourself.

Re: EOS M50 Mark II Art Photographs Underexposed

Waddizzle — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 14:46:17 GMT

@DennisMerritt wrote:

What I don't understand is why the camera didn't adjust the shutter speed down to get the proper exposure. I've since been playing with M mode and f/3.5 (as you suggest) and slowing the speed, and I can get more light and again, get the details washed out of the picture. What's the difference between exposure compensation and pushing the shutter speed down? (I can use a tripod as the art isn't going anyway.)

I suspect the difference is in how the scene is metered and how that metering information is used. The camera is using computational photography, its firmware. The camera has it, too, the photographer.

As I compare the two image, there is one thing that sticks out. The metering. If I assume that both images were metered at or near the bright, white area in the center of the flower, I see an obvious difference in the shade of the white. The phone has rendered the area pretty much as white. The camera has rendered the area more toward 18% Gray, which causes the entire scene to look darker.

The phone is able to calculate that exposure compensation is needed. It is able to accurately estimate what the final captured image will look like with these settings. If it thinks it is too dark, then the camera will add some exposure compensation to the settings before it captures the image.

The photographer is able to something similar by enabling a setting called ExpSIM. This setting enables the camera to present an image to the photographer that simulates the exposure settings. If you feel the image is too dark or to light, then you can tweak the final exposure using compensation.

Re: EOS M50 Mark II Art Photographs Underexposed

DennisMerritt — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 15:27:49 GMT

Thanks!

Re: EOS M50 Mark II Art Photographs Underexposed

Uneternal — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 15:52:43 GMT

Take the picture in RAW mode and edit it afterwards. Slight underexposure is ideal for RAW.

If you want it to come out right out-of-camera, use exposure compensation. Or work in M mode entirely. Your camera should be on a tripod, your ISO should be 100, use a zoom of about 50mm, close the aperture to f/5.6 for better crispness and then adjust the exposure time accordingly, you'll probably need 1/15 or longer. Use a 3-second time delay to avoid camera shake.

Re: EOS M50 Mark II Art Photographs Underexposed

Waddizzle — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 19:50:24 GMT

I had a typo. The phone’s camera uses computational photography. I left out the word phone.

Computational Photography means that it uses AI to make your photos look better. The end result is not an exact match to what was originally captured.