Canon 5d Mark iii Screen and Exposure

[gorilla]

I bought the Canon 5D Mark iii for studio photography.

But the highlight blinky is telling my the white background is pure white. Then when I import my images to my Mac they're underexposed.

How do I get my screen to show the real image. I've tried playing with the LCD screen brightness but thats not changing the blinking?

Sorry, new to this! Thanks

[jrhoffman75]

An image can have the main subject underexposed even if a portion is blown out. What is the RGB reading of the white background in your processing software. Are you shooting RAW?  The dynamic range could be too great. Can you change the lighting balance between subject and background?

If you are in a controlled setting and are happy with the images you can turn off the blinkies. 

[Waddizzle]

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@gorilla wrote:

I bought the Canon 5D Mark iii for studio photography.

But the highlight blinky is telling my the white background is pure white. Then when I import my images to my Mac they're underexposed.

How do I get my screen to show the real image. I've tried playing with the LCD screen brightness but thats not changing the blinking?

Sorry, new to this! Thanks

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The highlight blinky during in-camera playback is showing you which areas of the image are being overexposed.

The "Highlight Alert" is normally disabled from the tactory.  You can find the setting in the Playback 3 [BLUE] menu.

[kvbarkley]

How are you setting exposure? Your camera might be getting fooled by the light background. Try using spot exposure on the subject's face.

ETA:

ARe you using hot lights or flash? If flash, get Syl Arena's Spedilighters handbook. 

[TCampbell]

As I recall, you can get the "blinkies" if any color channel is blown out.  E.g. if you were to photograph a "red" object such as a bright red flower or bright red car, you could get the "blinkies" if merely the red color channel is blown out even though the other color channels are not blown out (clipped.)

The feature you can disable (if you don't want to see the blinkies) is called "highlight alert".  In the menu, navigate to the 3rd page of the blue "playback" (triangle icon) section and the top choice on that 3rd page is "Highlight Alert" and you can enable/disable the feature there.

On a 5D III if you are reviewing the image, you can press the "Info" button repeatedly to change what the camera displays (e.g. just the image, the image with some info, a small version of the image with a single combined histogram or you can get it to display the combined histogram (white) with the histogram for each R, G, & B color channel.  You'll notice it's possible to blow out (clip) a single color channel even though the white (combined) histogram shows no clipping.