Do you ever use the histogram?

Tim, as far as I can tell, you are applying ER to the letter; exposing as much to the right as possible without blowing any highlights and using the histogram in the process. Textbook approach!

Sometimes it doesn't always work, though, especially if the white balance in the actual scene causes a channel to clip that the Luminance based histogram doesn't show. Nice to have a camera that shows individual RGB histograms.

 

My Pentax K100D only has luminance based, but thankfully my recently purchased used Pentax K200D has options to show both Luminance or RGB histograms.

My D70 (yes, I know, it's ancient) has a luminance histogram only and I have, depending on circumstances, 1.5 to 2 stops of "headroom"; what a royal PITA! What we need of course are luminance and RGB histograms of the RAW data, but I'm not holding my breath.

I use it often, especially in post edits in Lightroom CC, but occasionally when shooting. Never hurts checking if you are shooting to bright or dark, though my camera has a feature that I turned on that will show you blow bright spots in the image if you are chimping you will notice. The blinking hot spot kind of catches your eye letting you know there are part of your image you can't recover in post, then I will peak at the histogram and adjust my shutter speed. Not always and not always in that order. I also agree with Tim. It doesn't always work perfect as there may be parts of the image that you want dark or bright, so the subject in the image is properly exposed. There are times it is useful and times not so much. Edited September 14, 2018 by Mark Keefer

Just remembered an option to improve the accuracy of the jpeg histogram to what will show up in the Raw processor shooting Raw when it comes to predicting highlight clipping.

 

I have my incamera jpeg rendering settings set to AdobeRGB output space (it might reduce saturation in each RGB channel when exposing highlights too close to clipping). Also have Contrast/Saturation reduced as much as the settings allow. This will also affect the incamera histogram clipping points.

 

Below is an example of the differences in incamera clipping and what shows up in my Raw processor (ACR 6.7) histogram shooting convection clouds as a test for exposing to the right which I don't recommend getting this close. I got lucky in that I was able to recover the blown highlights. I don't like white empty blobs in detailed fluffy clouds. I toss the image if that happens or clone it out.

Another way of getting there (Photoshop never has just ONE way) is the OZONE System ( The Ozone System: Photoshop Shadow/Highlight )

Another way of getting there (Photoshop never has just ONE way) is the OZONE System ( The Ozone System: Photoshop Shadow/Highlight )

 

This seems diametrically opposed to ER and I don't understand how this is beneficial. Maybe you can enlighten me?

Never use it.

diametrically opposed

Why so serious?

Why so serious?

 

Ozone seems diametrically opposed to ER and I don't understand how this is beneficial. Maybe you can enlighten me?