Exposing to the right: why and how?

Here we’re moving into tips for more advanced photographers. The photographic technique I’m introducing in this article, exposing to the right, is easier to understand if you already know the basics, especially exposure in photography. That said, you definitely don’t need to be a professional photographer to grasp the general idea and put it into practice. If you want to understand photography in more detail, this article is for you!

Because that is ultimately one of the goals of this photography blog: to make photography and everything around it—technique, tips, camera gear, and more—as easy to understand as possible. The technique itself will help you get the most out of your sensor and improve the overall quality of your photos, which is pretty cool, right?

After a quick reminder about the histogram in photography, I’ll explain the real value of exposing to the right, how to use it in practice with your DSLR camera (or another type of camera), what the limits of this technique are, and how to post-process this kind of photo. At the end of the article, I’ll show you a concrete example of how useful this technique can be and the positive effect it can have on image quality. Just keep in mind that this technique is much more effective if you shoot in RAW.

Before getting into the technique itself, I wanted to give you a few quick reminders about this very important concept. I’ve written a full article on the histogram in photography if you’re not yet familiar with it.

To put it simply, the histogram is a graphic representation of all the tones in your photo. As soon as you take a shot, it already gives you a good idea of whether your photo is underexposed, overexposed, or lacking contrast, for example.

So why do we use the term “exposing to the right”? The idea simply refers to the histogram of your photo. A histogram is made up of several areas, from left to right:

• Black areas,
• Shadow areas,
• Midtones,
• Highlights,
• White areas.

Simply put, the more your histogram is pushed toward the left, the more dark and black tones you’ll have in your photo. This article focuses on the opposite approach, since the technique explained here consists of exposing your histogram “as far to the right as possible” (while avoiding overexposure, which we’ll come back to later). The goal is therefore to bring as many highlights and white tones as possible into your image. I’ll now explain why and how.

Without going into too much detail, it’s useful to explain why exposing to the right can be interesting in photography. First of all, you should know that there is a difference between a JPEG file (the basic file produced by your camera) and a RAW file, which is the digital equivalent of film: a raw image that needs to be processed in post-production.

Why am I telling you this? Because when you shoot with your DSLR, the sensor records different levels of brightness depending on whether you’re shooting in JPEG or RAW. In JPEG, the sensor captures 256 levels of light (encoded in 8 bits), compared with 4,096 or 16,384 tones in RAW (depending on whether the file is 12-bit or 14-bit). Sure, this may sound like a detail, but the point is that a RAW file contains much more information than a JPEG.

The important thing to remember is that brightness levels are not distributed evenly across a histogram. In fact, about 50% of the data is allocated to the highlight area (the right side of the histogram). The remaining half is then distributed among the neighboring tones, and so on. Once again, what does that mean in practical terms? Simply that more data is recorded in the highlights than in the midtones or darker tones. To put it simply, you can capture a lot of information when your photo is bright, and very little in the shadows or black areas.

To prove it, I tested two photos. In the first one, the exposure was set using Av semi-automatic mode. In the second, I increased the exposure compensation by +1. Both photos are correctly exposed, and no white areas were overexposed. However, the photo on the right contains much more information than the one on the left. The proof is that the file is “2.3 MB” heavier. Even though the image may look very bright, especially in the sky, it contains much more information and detail in the dark areas of the image, especially on the slope in the foreground. PS: this photo is here to illustrate the point, not to win any awards!

If you’re new to photography, or if you’ve read the article on ISO sensitivity, you probably know that photos taken in low light, often at high ISO, are prone to digital noise, which creates a pretty unattractive effect in images. The general idea with this technique is therefore to limit the appearance of shadows and black areas as much as possible and to concentrate your photo on the right side of the histogram. It will be much easier to recover information in the bright areas of an image (by darkening them) than to recover information from black areas (by brightening them). In the latter case, noise will appear much more strongly. I also wrote a full article on how to shoot indoors and in low light, which may interest you.

Keep this in mind: “I’m recovering as much information as possible for post-processing on the computer.” In reality, the more you expose your photo toward medium or dark tones, the more information you lose and the more you reduce the quality of your image. This technique is particularly useful when you have high-contrast scenes with big differences in brightness, for example in landscape photography. If you are already shooting in difficult conditions, and depending on your gear, this technique is not always recommended. We’ll come back to that below.

Now that we’ve looked at the numbers and the value of “exposing to the right,” as it’s often called, let’s see how to put it into practice on your camera. I should point out that whether you use a DSLR, a mirrorless camera, or a compact camera, the histogram is usually available (although I don’t know many people who shoot RAW on a compact camera and edit their photos!).

As mentioned earlier, the goal is to shift the histogram to the right. Be careful, though: the histogram must not be pushed entirely to the right or cut off on the right. If that happens, it simply means that your photo is heavily overexposed and that you have lost all the information in the white areas. In practical terms, those areas are pure white, and you won’t be able to recover any detail from them in post-processing.

First of all, you should check your manual to find out which button displays the histogram for your photo (it is often the INFO or DISP button). You can then use this technique in either semi-automatic or manual mode. Let’s get into it.

If you are using semi-automatic modes (Av / Tv on Canon cameras), the process is as follows:

• Stand in front of your subject with your digital camera, work on your framing, and choose your settings,
• Take a first photo and look at your histogram. If the histogram is too centered (and therefore not far enough to the right), you’ll need to use what is called exposure compensation. On Canon cameras, you press the “Q” button to access the settings menu. Then you simply use positive exposure compensation, meaning you move the small cursor to the right of zero (to +1/3, +2/3, or +1),
• Take the photo again, and you’ll see that your image is brighter,
• Repeat the process several times if needed, moving a few notches to the right. Depending on the conditions, you may need to go up to +1, or maybe even +1.5.

If you’re comfortable with the exposure triangle (ISO, shutter speed, aperture), you can switch to Manual mode (M) instead of using exposure compensation and choose the settings that work best to push your histogram to the right. On the other hand, this requires very good control of your settings. I know that in some situations, Av mode isn’t enough for me, and I prefer switching to M mode.

On the screen, the photo may sometimes look too bright, but that also depends on the brightness of your screen. So don’t rely on it too much. You can also activate the overexposure warning on some cameras, which will tell you if your photo is “blown out” (too bright). But that isn’t an exact science either. I’ll explain that below.

This technique is highly appreciated by many photographers, but it does have its limits. Here are the main ones, in my opinion:

• The first essential thing to know is that the histogram displayed on your camera screen, even if you shoot in RAW, is only a rough approximation of the tones in the JPEG associated with the RAW file. The camera can’t read the RAW file directly, and you’ll need to run it through software to display the real RAW histogram. If you’re looking for good software to examine your RAW files in detail -> RawDigger,
• As a result, you should be careful with the overexposure warning you may see on some cameras. I would say that these warnings tend to overestimate overexposure. An area that appears clipped (too white) when it blinks on your histogram will not necessarily be clipped when you import the RAW file into Lightroom, for example,
• For photos with moving subjects (sports, action, wildlife, etc.), this technique can only be applied to a certain extent. My advice would be to position yourself where the shot will be taken, take a few test photos, adjust the settings (meaning expose to the right), and save them. If the brightness of the scene or the angle of your shot doesn’t change, you can then take a series of photos without worrying about your histogram. If one parameter changes (the sun disappears, you change position, etc.), you’ll need to set your histogram to the right again,

• I’ll say it again here, but exposing to the right necessarily requires shooting in RAW, both to capture as much information as possible when you take the photo and to make the most of it afterward, especially in the highlight/white areas where most of the data is located,
• The last limit of this technique is the risk of unintentional motion blur or even camera shake. You’re probably thinking: what does that have to do with it? I see two specific cases.

If you’re already shooting in very difficult light conditions (undergrowth, concerts, etc.), you’re going to have a hard time pushing your histogram to the right. By deliberately forcing the exposure to the right, you force your camera to compensate through another setting. If you use +1 exposure compensation, for example, you’ll slow down the shutter speed and therefore increase the risk of camera shake. If you’re already on the limit, for example when shooting handheld, the photo may end up blurry. With a tripod, that won’t be a problem. However, if your subject is moving, there is a higher risk of unintentional motion blur because the shutter speed will be too slow for the subject’s movement. The sharpness of your photo may suffer.

Depending on the lens you’re using, you may also find this technique difficult to apply. I’m thinking in particular of long focal length lenses, which require a fast shutter speed to avoid blurry photos. Again, the more you expose to the right, the more likely you are to get a blurry photo (or to have to raise the ISO to compensate, with the risk of introducing noise).

As already mentioned in the article, you’ll need post-processing software to process your RAW files. One of the best-known options, and the one I use, is Lightroom. I admit that if you’re new to photography, the first steps in processing and learning the software may seem a little tricky at first, but you get used to it quickly!

If you exposed your photo to the right, it may look too bright to your eye. The advantage is that you have recovered detail in the shadow areas (by slightly overexposing) while being careful not to blow out your highlights.

The goal now is very often to:

• Reduce the exposure of the highlights while keeping some detail (often in the sky, for example),
• Set the black areas correctly and brighten the shadow areas of your image (they would have been even darker without this technique).

In any case, post-processing always remains a very personal interpretation and choice. There is no perfect edit!

I’ll end this article with a small image test. I went through my archives to find a photo from my trip to Asia that had not been perfectly exposed and was slightly underexposed. The technique of exposing to the right had not been used. I was in Av mode, and the camera had chosen the exposure. I have now adjusted the levels of the photo after the fact to brighten it in a “correct” way. See below the edited photo and the 100% zoom, even if it may not be very obvious on screen!

I then zoomed in to 100% on the edited image in Lightroom to look at the shadow areas that had been lightened, or in other words brightened, after adjusting the levels. As you can see quite clearly, digital noise appears, along with a kind of artifact that isn’t very attractive, simply because the shadow areas have been brightened. The technique of exposing to the right therefore makes it possible to expose the shadow and black areas in a “lighter” way, which avoids having to brighten them in post-processing. This clearly limits the appearance of noise. Of course, it also depends on how well your camera handles noise (which is why that matters)!

So, to conclude on the value of exposing to the right in photography, I would say that it is a very interesting technique because it helps you get the best out of your sensor by avoiding the creation of noise in the shadow/dark areas of your image, but above all by recovering as much information as possible in the highlights. In any case, it’s one of the tricks I use whenever I shoot, and I really recommend giving it a try!

I hope the explanations in this article were clear. Did you understand everything? Are you ready to try it out? If you like interesting techniques to improve your pictures, I invite you to understand long exposure in photography.

See you soon, and good shooting,

Written by Sylvain PONS

I've been passionate about photography since 2010, learning as I went along. Today, I dedicate myself to guiding others in their choice of camera gear and sharing a variety of tips to improve their photography skills.

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