Under exposed photos

[paulinebarrell]

<p>I have a Canon 300D and alot of my photos are dark compared to those taken by other people's cameras. They need to be tweeked on the computer. Can I adjust the settings?</p>

[Matt Laur]

<p>Can you scale down an example shot (say, to no more than 700 pixels wide), and post it here as an example? With luck, the embedded exposure details will still be intact in the JPG file, and we can get some sense of how to help.</p>

[jonathonswersey]

<p>Pauline, the simple answer is yes - but first question would be what settings are you using on your camera? Proper exposure is based on aperture (how much light you let in), shutter speed (how long you let the light in) and ISO (how sensitive to light the sensor is). So if you're pictures are too dark, you might be off in one of these areas. If you are using some sort of automatic setting (Shutter Priority, Aperture Priority, Program) - you can change the EV from 0 to +1 - or some other number - experiment! Changing the EV tells the camera you want to override the exposure.<br>

The other thing that could happen is if you are shooting something very white (think a snowy mountain on a bright day) - your camera will see that setting and try to make it look neutral grey. So counter-intuitively - if you're shooting a bright scene, you need to overexpose (decrease shutter speed, increase aperture, or increase ISO).<br>

But Pauline, comparing one camera to another can be faulty - and I would think it is unlikely that a camera would be consistently too dark - unless a setting is out of whack. Maybe you could post an image or two that you think is too dark?</p>

[donald_kim_lewiston]

<p>When I take pictures of snowy mountains up here in Washington, the automatic settings always fool my camera because of the white background. Try taking a picture of a neutral subject (not too dark or light in color). If you are using the automatic settings, more likely than not, the images should be properly exposed unless you have changed the EV settings.<br>

<br /> One other cause may be that your computer monitor is not calibrated correctly and is showing pictures as being "dark" when they may not really be. Check the histogram of the picture either in the camera or a photo editing program to check.<br>

Hope this helps.</p>