Camera exposure tricks: the quickest way to rescue over- and under-exposure

Do your images turn out too dark or too light? We show you the quickest and easiest way to put them right… using your camera’s exposure compensation feature.

If your pictures sometimes come out either too dark or too light it’s usually because the camera’s built in light meter is incorrectly calculating the exposure.

This can happen when you are shooting subjects or scenes that are either have a lot of bright or dark areas. In these kinds of situations you need to adjust the exposure by overriding the camera’s meter.

One of the best ways to learn about exposure and how to control it is to view the histogram after taking your shot.

The histogram is a bar graph, which shows a range of up to 256 tones from pure black (far left) to pure white (far right) along the bottom axis.

If the histogram is roughly central and fits within the graph then a full range of tones has been recorded and the image will be correctly exposed.

SEE MORE: Histogram – photography cheat sheets for achieving perfect exposure

But if the histogram is cut off on either side you will need to adjust the exposure using the exposure compensation button.

If the histogram is cut off on the left hand side the shot is too dark – under-exposed – and the picture needs lightening by increasing the exposure time.

Conversely, if the histogram is clipped on the right hand side the shot is too light – over-exposed – so you’ll need to reduce the exposure to make it darker.

Over-exposure is a bigger problem than under-exposure because if the highlights are blown then no detail will have been recorded in the whites and this cannot be rescued using processing