EOS M50 Mark II Art Photographs Underexposed

[DennisMerritt]

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)

[FloridaDrafter · Accepted solution]

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

[deebatman316 · Accepted solution]

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.

[DennisMerritt]

Is it possible something has gone wrong in my camera? That the light meter has gotten tired or blocked? Because this camera is supposed to be good for VLogging and the like and I've used it for that and it's worked great with studio lights. And my outdoor photography is coming in underexposed as well. Here's two photos again, comparing the Canon with my i Phone in not-that-bright early morning and this problem has only started happening recently.CanoniPhone

[deebatman316 · Accepted solution]

The problem is the white snow fooling the camera’s metering system. If the camera sees white it will underexpose. The camera’s metering system sees gray and it will try to make everything that way. Your phone uses Color Matrix Metering. It takes color into account when metering. Your camera cannot do that. Your phone is using what’s called Computational Photography. No standalone camera has that. So to fix the underexpose use Exposure Compensation. I don’t believe anything is wrong with your camera. Most cameras will underexpose in that type of scene.

[DennisMerritt]

Thanks everyone for all the help! Here's what worked -- 1) too hard to get my fancy lights to light up uniformly, so I wait for nice indirect sunlight near a window; 2) place a WhiBal card next to the painting; 3) shoot using the Exposure Compensation to get what I want and stop whining about it, and leaving it a little bit dark; 4) going into Photoshop and using Levels and the WhiBal card to set the colors. Here's one of my friend's paintings: