@hishimaru - "The author is talking about digital raw stills and I think he's making a good point."

As long as you've got good lighting along with 12 or 14-bit RAW color depth. Only then are highlights more of an issue than noise. In nighttime available light, however, pulling the shadow details off the noise floor is still crucial, along with keeping ISO as low as possible.

@dkitsov
I don't think I've ever seen anyone advocate overexposing highlights on a digital camera, and I think that's where the article indulges in a straw-man argument. In addition to blowing out highlight detail, overexposure will shift the color balance of any non-white highlight. A reddish-orange car taillight, for example, can turn yellowish as the red channel saturates before the green does.

In my view, the author's most misleading claim was "These days, noise is really not a big source of image quality loss..." In my work, I hit the noise floor every time I deal with GH2 shadow detail, especially with 8-bit AVCHD frames whose noise bits are much more granular than 12 or 14-bit RAW images. It's always preferable to digitize shadows with as many bits as you can squeeze out of the camera, so long as you don't blow the highlights. In post, the more bits of color depth you have, the easier it is to grade the shadow details.

@LPowell, it seems that there are two different expose to the right understandings. To me expose to the right was always about perhaps overexposing visually (using a histogram as a reference so not to clip the highlights) but recording more info and ten correcting in post. The article you are unhappy with seems to concentrate on the exposing to the right as the right being an absolute limit for the highlights, which for the high contrast (as the scene they use in the article) scenes will of course cause an extreme underexposure. This however does not change the fact that it is a good practice for digital just like it was for the slide film to expose for the highlights (do not clip them) and then use all the fill and bounce you can afford to equalize the exposure. I fully agree that for the low contrast scenes expose to the right is the best way to go.

Well, as a general rule, I do think usually about saving highlights shooting video, same as we used to do with Kodachrome, etc. You can pull up noisy blacks but you can't usually pull back blown whites.

Well it certainly does as far as exposure is concerned. With digital just like with slide you expose for the highlights and fill for shadows. With negative you expose for shadows and develop for your highlights.

I love this comment on that article: "I have learned to expose the subject right."

Here's an interesting article on TOP by Ctein that calls bullshit on the ETTR rule

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2011/10/expose-to-the-right-is-a-bunch-of-bull.html

@LucasAdamson
In B&W film mode, the AVCHD encoder will store minimal data in the two chroma channels and record the luma channel as usual.

@LPowell, I have an upcoming short, shooting on GH1s with Peak Reliability patch (thanks btw) for a film we want to be b&w. Would shooting in camera B&W improve levels of chroma available, or just reduce bitrate?

Guys, sorry for the silly question, but I've never really much used anything other than standard and I've been using lighting / reflectors to control DR, together with making adjustments in post.

Last night I was attempting to shoot the moon through a telescope and using various other lenses, and it was varying quite a lot as the clouds passed in front of it (nice effect though). Because the brightness was going up and down I simply couldn't arrive at an exposure which worked at both "ends" of the scale, ie to show the details on the bright surface when there weren't any clouds, and at the other end, to show the dim moon with the clouds around it, lit up. That's a scenario with a huge dynamic range, and I discovered that because I couldn't capture the extremes well, it was pretty much impossible to do anything with the images afterwards.

So are there good in-camera settings that give a bit more highlight / lowlight compression for contrasty subjects so you can get the best out of the 8 bits available? I know, I can experiment, but some of you must be more familiar with the various presets on the camera than I am and I was hoping you could suggest what to try.

The one good thing about my Canon XHA1 was its comprehensive menus for highlight and lowlight compression but because the GH2 is so good anyway, I haven't particularly had issues with using Standard up till now. And unfortunately the moon scenario isn't one I can control with lighting or reflectors!

I'd determine aperture and shutter speed. Then ISO varies up to a limiter. Comfortably up to 800. Maybe 1250.

But I don't want to stick to ETTR all the time. Sometimes it's nice to do underexposing to give a proper mood.

Even if there is enough lighting to keep ISO low, sometimes the source clips still look crappy. I think that's when ETTR can shine.

I think ETTR explains why highlight roll-off can be a good thing. Often 8-bit depth won't give enough DR. Then we gotta decide either overexpose or underexpose. I prefer slight overexposure if ISO can stay low enough. That feels like walking on thin ice :)

@LucasAdamson - "would you agree that ETTR has a place in 8 bit acquisition?"

Yes, the fewer bits you have to work with, the more important it is to make optimal use of them.