Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote:
On Aug 1, 2005, at 7:56 PM, Scott Loveless wrote:
I have what may seem like a dumb question, Paul: why would I want to
overexpose by a stop on light-skinned people but not darker- skinned
people?
Or did I read that backwards?
If their skin comes into play when metering, your camera could
underexpose light skin and overexpose dark skin. So you need to
compensate. But I've always thought this was more a black and white
technique. Does it really apply for digital imaging?
It's a principle driven by basic reflective meter response calibration.
Remember that a reflected light meter believes that ANYTHING in front
of it is an 18% gray average target. Makes no difference whether you're
metering for a sensor or a piece of film, b&w or color.
Of course, some adjustment to how much you alter the exposure based
upon what the particular film/sensor response curve happens to be is
appropriate...
This all works very well when spot metering faces. Exposure adjustment
when using multi-segmented metering is a crapshoot at best.
Tom Reese
