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

[kvbarkley]

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

[deebatman316]

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

[DennisMerritt]

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.

[deebatman316]

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

[DennisMerritt]

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

[deebatman316]

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

[DennisMerritt]

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

[DennisMerritt]

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.)

[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.