Stupidly Simple steps to fix Underexposure.
Or How to get Snow White.
Have you taken some snow shots recently? Have they turned out dull and grey?
Have you seen a vision in sparkly white but ended up with dull, boring and flat?
There is an easy way to fix that in a Photo Editor and a simple trick to get it right next time you are out your camera.
The problem arises because of the way your camera reads the scene. It’s set up for what is known as 15% grey. That’s a measure of the tones across the image.
For certain scenes, such as snow, the camera doesn’t know the overall scene is bright and white and exposes it to record as 15% grey. Consequently it underexposes the shot.
We can easily fix this in just a couple of minutes even if you are completely new to photo editing.
This is a shot I took with the camera on it’s usual settings and no exposure compensation dialled in. It’s horribly underexposed.
But all is not lost. The RAW image I have taken has a lot information in it that can be released with one super quick adjustment.
Opening the file in the photo editor brings up a couple of panels in the right hand column, one of which is Add an Adjustment. If it isn’t there got Image in the top line menu then adjustments. In either case choose levels. Levels has an icon that looks like a little bar chart in the side panel.
This will bring up the levels dialogue box on your screen. As you can see in the screen shot above, the histogram finishes a long way before the end of the graph space. I will need to move the white marker to meet the white area as indicated by the arrow.