Do you tend to underexpose slightly to avoid clipping highlights or do you tend to "expose to the right"?

Question

I've heard both techniques being promoted.

Which do you tend to do and why

Related to this, is it easier to recover shadows or highlights from a raw file and does this influence your exposure settings ?

Answer 1

I'm not sure those two exposure tips are mutually exclusive, as you never want to clip either side of the curve. Exposing to the right only means to push the curve towards the white end of the curve, but to do so without clipping. Now, you CAN clip a very small amount and recover it if shooting in RAW mode. That is occasionally necessary if the tonal range is such that the scene clips at both ends.

The trouble with recovering shadow detail is that there is a much smaller amount of information that a equivalent area of highlights, so recovery often leads to undo amounts of noise.

Answer 2

I have the exposure compensation on my camera set to underexpose, as I find it easier to recover shadows than highlights.

With digital cameras, once the highlights are burnt out there's nothing you can do, but there is often much more detail in the shadows than you can see at first glance.

I cant say that the problem really concerns me as I usually shoot in raw and bracket by 2 stops, I find three exposures usually sufficient to create a HDR file with which I can change exposure in different parts of the image using adjustment layers and layer masks in photoshop.