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albionshire · ‎02-24-2024

I've been advised that a good exposure for histograms should be in the middle, what do you think of this? Is it over exposed or underexposed? My issue is if I get the big curve to go in the middle of the picture, it looks darker, the other issue is I'm using a calibrate colour chart and their suggestion is the 4th grey patch should be RGB 128, to get it to 128 there's no way I can get the curve to be in the middle, am I missing something? This current histogram gets me close enough to 128 so does that mean the exposure is correct?

rs-eos · ‎02-24-2024

Potentially. It really depends upon how the 50% gray swatch on your color checker reads.

e.g. if you bring the RAW file you took into Adobe Lightroom, Capture One, or presumably also Canon's DPP, it should give you some indication as to the luminance or RGB values as you over over the 50% gray swatch.

While I don't have the corresponding histograms in the following post, I did captures of my 50% gray card with my lighting. I adjusted the lighting up/down until the peak in the histogram was perfectly centered on the back of my camera (I only had a single peak since the size of my gray card filled the frame). However, in software such as Lightroom, you can crop in to a particular part of the image representing the gray square to verify where it by itself will read on the histogram. Since your image contains lots of colors and the fabric in the background, it is a bit difficult to see if 50% gray is exactly at the middle. However, it does look good and I feel if any adjustments are needed, it would only be minor (perhaps 1/3 stop more exposure perhaps).

For reference, see the middle section of my post here: Camera and Lighting Experiements - Noise, Exposure, Color

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Ricky

Camera: EOS 5D IV, EF 50mm f/1.2L, EF 135mm f/2L
Lighting: Profoto Lights & Modifiers

View solution in original post

rs-eos · ‎02-24-2024

If one of these replies has solved the original question, please mark it as the solution. That helps other forum users know which topics have been solved as well as helping others with similar questions. Thank you.

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Ricky

Camera: EOS 5D IV, EF 50mm f/1.2L, EF 135mm f/2L
Lighting: Profoto Lights & Modifiers

albionshire · ‎02-24-2024

They all did, to be fair!

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Does this histogram look right? R10