OK so we've all heard the advice that if the dynamic range of the scene allows it we should try to expose to the right when shooting raw, to capture more tonal detail since the upper eV stops contain more data than the lower ones. This makes a certain sense, and I try to use it when I can. Somebody brought up a point on DPR a while back about this technique though, stating that you should adjust the tonality back down to where it should be (ie move the histogram to the left) after raw conversion once you're in 16-bit gamma-corrected space (ie in photoshop post-processing). His logic was that since the lower stops have less granularity in linear space, moving the histogram to the left at that point would essentially throw away some of that extra detail you had captured, since there's nowhere for it to go. The poster even went so far as to say that for a normally-exposed shot moving the histogram to the right during RAW conversion and then moving it back to the left in post-processing was a good idea. To me that makes no sense at all, but in the case an image that started out "exposed to the right" I wonder if he may have a point.
So the question is, if you expose to the right when shooting, when should you shift the tonality of the image back to the left - in linear space during RAW conversion, or after conversion during post-processing in gamma-corrected space?
So the question is, if you expose to the right when shooting, when should you shift the tonality of the image back to the left - in linear space during RAW conversion, or after conversion during post-processing in gamma-corrected space?
