Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision

The Best Digital Negative

Beyond that, a proper exposure means a better-looking image, so an understanding of digital exposure is important. Simply put, the best digital negative—assuming there will be some work in post-processing—is the file with the most amount of data. Your camera’s histogram, the graph displayed on your LCD with the spikey mountains on it, is the key to this. This graph represents the capture of the scene you just shot—from shadows without detail on the far left, to highlights without detail on the far right. In between is your scene, represented as tonal values. What is important is not the height of the peaks—you can’t do anything about those—but where the mountains are situated from left to right on the histogram. Too ...