Why is the Photoshop default brightness +50?

[Bettina]

Hi all!
I am an amateur photographer and I have until recently used a Nikon D3000 for all my pictures - mostly children, "events" and portraits, lately. Something that had always bugged me with my D3000 was that I had the feeling all or most pictures were underexposed, and that was confirmed by Photoshop (my interpretation), since it always got my pictures a +50 brightness. So I always reduced the brightness, lifted the exposure to sth. between +0.40 and +0.95, then reduced the noise and, sometimes, got some fill light as well. Still, apart from considering this is pretty much work for little (shouldn't th default be different?), I was also frustrated by getting noise into the pictures when it's not necessary.
So I very recently switched to a Canon 60D with pancake lense, and to my big surprise (and disappointment), there it is again: Photoshop +50 Brightness as a default, and although the image is definitely not as dark as with my Nikon, it still needs either brightness or a higher exposition.
I don't get it: why is Photoshop set this way? Is it the right thing to fussle around and change the exposition, or am I messing up my pictures (and making a fool of myself spending so much time in doing it)? I feel the pictures lose depth when I use the default brightness, but I am no pro and it doesn't sound plausible to me that my changes should be necessary, otherwise the default would be just that, right?
Plus, I get a feeling that my color balance in the new camera is wrong, there's too much fuchsia. But I have to chech if this is a setup, it could well be.
I don't know if this is important information for the answer, but I use P to shoot my pictures and have so far not done anything out of the ordinary with my camera (that is, all automatic so far, and trying to practice how to best adjust the photometer (mostly servo).

Thanks so much in advance for any answer!

[Shadowman]

Hi Bettina, hopefully that's your name; it might help to upload a sample photograph and include camera settings. Also, when you review the image does the image show blown highlights? Are you shooting RAW or jpeg? My experience with Nikon cameras is that it tends to slightly overexpose unless shooting in manual mode. Regarding Photoshop, it's been awhile since I've used but if you are shooting RAW it shouldn't adjust your settings unless you set the software to apply the change.

[Bettina]

Hi John, yes, Bettina is my name. :-) Thanks for the advice, I'll edit my post now to upload a sample, if I can find one, with standard settings and then with what I do to the picture. I shoot raw, and it's funny you feel the opposite (overexposure, I mean). About the settings, I didn't touch them; I have some custom ones, but the default is still untouched, and it sets a +50 brightness. I use Photoshop 5.1.

**No he podido subir la foto: en la resolución máxima no se ve bien los colores y con eso no se aprecia la diferencia... :-(**

[Black Pearl]

At a guess you have the camera set to Active D-Lighting so it is deliberately under exposing your shots to hold onto highlight detail. This will work for out of camera jpeg files and if you were using the Nikon software to process NEF files but won't necessarily work in Photoshop.

Quick fix would be to look for the feature and if its on - turn it off.

[Bettina]

Thanks! No, I don't like Active D-Lighting and always had it off (the other user of my camera liked it and turned it on, so I always made sure I turned it off). Plus, it's the same with Canon now, where there's no D-Lighting...

[Shadowman]

Bettina,

Check out this link and see if it addresses your problem.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/us...eferences.html

[dje]

Hi Bettina

I think you are worrying un-necessarily about this Brightness 50% setting. It's just a default and will come up that way no matter what image you load in there. It's not an indication of the exposure or brightness of your images.

It sounds like your images are under-exposed and you need to find out why. You could check that the Metering mode is set to Evaluative - this is probably the safest mode to use for general shooting to get good exposure. Also make sure there is no negative exposure compensation set.

Dave

[Manfred M]

Bettina - welcome to CiC.

A few things strike me right away. The fact that you are getting similar results from two different cameras made by two different manufacturers suggests to me that it is NOT a camera issue.

My first question would be to ask you if your computer screen is calibrated and set to an appropriate brightness level? Unless you are in the ball park there, what you see on the screen should be questioned. The fact that you are seeing colours that do not appear to be correct, the fuchsia tones, for instance, has me questioning your screen and screen setup as well.

In the absence of any other information, how do you determine the image is properly exposed? In my view, I will use the histogram on my camera and the histogram I see in Photoshop to make this determination. If I see no clippings of dark values or clipping of light values, I know I am in the range, I can easily make minor tweaks in post processing to ensure a broad luminence range in the image. If I see a distinct bias towards the left or right hand side of the histogram, that does not seem to agree with the image I shot, I might also question my exposure.

The other clue in your information is the fact that you are seeing noisy images. This tends to be something we see in underexposed images even more than in high ISO settings, so something seems to be wrong here.

Another small point - you say you shoot raw but are concerned about Acitve D-Lighting. This has no impact on raw data and only is applied to jpegs.

I'd suggest you might want to post some images here so we can see what you are getting. It's difficult to diagnose a problem without seeing the problem images. In order to post here, please check out the following thread on posting images:

HELP THREAD: How can I post images here?

[Bettina]

Hi Manfred,

Thanks so much for the answer. Yes, the fact that I feel my pictures are underexposed with both cameras and totally different lenses is a sign, to me, that it's not a question of the camera. And there are many different things that sort of play together, but are not the real core of the question... Or maybe it's just that I'm not managing to say what I mean. :-S
The thing is: I have been changing all my pictures to reduce the default brightness in photoshop and then compensate it by manually increasing the exposure. This procedure brings noise into my pictures, or at least it did with my Nikon. So that's why I don't really like doing it, but I still preferred that to the increased brightness (when you have 50% brightness, skyes get less blue, I feel backgrounds are more matte, there is less contrast overall).
After blaming my camera for these issues, I changed; and discovered that it wasn't a camera problem at all. That Photoshop default is +50 brightness for all raw. And THAT got me thinking: am I missing something? Is it actually a good thing to increase brightness by default? So it is a rather general question, really. I just started feeling silly for changing something I thought was clever and made pictures look better, and now I realize I might be totally in the wrong.

(As to my screen: no, it's not calibrated and I am aware of the implications; but it is not too far away, and I work with photos by professional photographers and can see those are usually lighter than my **raws with less than +50 brightness**.)

I am just really puzzled, that's all... And thanks for the photo-upload link. I'll check that out as well!

[Manfred M]

Hi Manfred,

Thanks so much for the answer. Yes, the fact that I feel my pictures are underexposed with both cameras and totally different lenses is a sign, to me, that it's not a question of the camera. And there are many different things that sort of play together, but are not the real core of the question... Or maybe it's just that I'm not managing to say what I mean. :-S
The thing is: I have been changing all my pictures to reduce the default brightness in photoshop and then compensate it by manually increasing the exposure. This procedure brings noise into my pictures, or at least it did with my Nikon. So that's why I don't really like doing it, but I still preferred that to the increased brightness (when you have 50% brightness, skyes get less blue, I feel backgrounds are more matte, there is less contrast overall).
After blaming my camera for these issues, I changed; and discovered that it wasn't a camera problem at all. That Photoshop default is +50 brightness for all raw. And THAT got me thinking: am I missing something? Is it actually a good thing to increase brightness by default? So it is a rather general question, really. I just started feeling silly for changing something I thought was clever and made pictures look better, and now I realize I might be totally in the wrong.

(As to my screen: no, it's not calibrated and I am aware of the implications; but it is not too far away, and I work with photos by professional photographers and can see those are usually lighter than my **raws with less than +50 brightness**.)

I am just really puzzled, that's all... And thanks for the photo-upload link. I'll check that out as well!

I think you are putting too much weight on that +50 value. 50 is simply the mid-point between 0 (black) and 100 (white). That does not have any particular meaning for anything else and the mid-value seems like a decent starting point.

I'm also trying to figure out where your +50 comes from, as I do not have that with the version of Photoshop (CC 2015) that I am working with. On my brightness control, I show a "0" and darker values are -ve and brighter values are +ve.

[dje]

I think you are putting too much weight on that +50 value. 50 is simply the mid-point between 0 (black) and 100 (white). That does not have any particular meaning for anything else and the mid-value seems like a decent starting point.

I'm also trying to figure out where your +50 comes from, as I do not have that with the version of Photoshop (CC 2015) that I am working with. On my brightness control, I show a "0" and darker values are -ve and brighter values are +ve.

Manfred I think Bettina is using CS5 which has the 2010 version of ACR. The brightness slider is in this version of ACR but of course it has dis-appeared from later versions.

Dave

[Manfred M]

Manfred I think Bettina is using CS5 which has the 2010 version of ACR. The brightness slider is in this version of ACR but of course it has dis-appeared from later versions.

Dave

Thanks Dave - I seem to adjust to the newest version fairly quickly and generally have no idea as to what happened back in 2010 when CS5 came out (that was 4 releases ago). I do know that Adobe did a major overhaul to the raw engine in CS6 and finally fixed some issue that had been affecting Nikon shooters for quite some time. None of this is related to Bettina's issues though.

[Bettina]

Exactly. Still, I had a closer look at the noise in my pictures (something that always bothered me with my previous camera) and it is still there... Can I be doing something generally wrong that is causing my pictures to be underexposed? That seems to make no sense to me... Since I shoot on P, or Av. :-/
As to the +50 value, the middle point is 0, in this case; but if this system is obsolete now, I suppose there's no real chance that I'll find the answer... sigh. I'll probably just have to live and learn.
But I'm now reading about histograms, it seems like I've been missing out on a lot of fun. :-P So thanks for that, too Manfred! Maybe I'll find a clue to work out the perfect brightness and contrast through that...

[Shadowman]

Might be quicker to reset the camera to default settings, I'm thinking only in-camera settings that would specifically underexpose an image would be exposure compensation (but this would shift exposure to the left), bracketed exposure, camera set to record HDR, metered off bright object; just to name a few.

[Manfred M]

Bettina - what ISO value are you shooting at? The lowest noise levels occur at or close to base ISO.

If you are shooting in "normal" lighting conditions, there is no reason to change the exposure of the image coming out of your camera much (most?) of the time. "P" mode allows your camera to select the appropriate shutter speed and aperture settings, based on the focal length you are shooting at. If you are using one of the averaging metering modes, the exposures should be quite close. If you have set the camera to spot metering, it could be off quite a bit.

I assume that you are either choosing the ISO value manually or are using AUTO-ISO (where the camera chooses an appropriate value).

Have you changed the exposure compensation setting? For most normal shooting, this should be set to "0". If you are running on the "-" side of things, this will result in underexposure, so check you camera to make sure you haven't accidentally set that.

Other than that, unless you can post images, preferably with the metadata attached, we are all just going to be guessing at what is happening here.

The other thing you need to realize is that the settings in Photoshop are all going to be applied relative to the data that is being worked on. These are not absolute values that will get you a properly exposed image. A +50 value may be fine for one image, but may need a significant change in either direction for another image.

[Black Pearl]

One other thing - can you open one of your files in Photoshop and before you do anything to it grab the screen and post it so we can see how the page looks and where the major sliders are.

[Black Pearl]

Bettina - welcome to CiC.


Another small point - you say you shoot raw but are concerned about Acitve D-Lighting. This has no impact on raw data and only is applied to jpegs.


HELP THREAD: How can I post images here?

If you have Active D-Lighting working on the camera is does affect raw files as they will be under exposed - now some raw converters read the data and correct this and some don't. If all of Bettina's images are coming out under exposed it is worth checking if this function is running.

[george013]

A discussion with a minimum of information given.

A thought though. If you're shooting raw, the picture must first be converted, happens in the converter. That created raster image is given to Photoshop which starts with it default settings. If this is true, then the problem is the converter.
If the brightnes scale is runnig from 0 to 100, than 50 means probably nothing has been corrected yet.
I don't have Photoshop, just guessing.

George

Just read Robins post. I agree with that. Active D-ligtning changes the camera settings.
In general one can figure out whether the converter is the problem or not by shooting a RAW and JPG. If the JPG out of the camera is different from the JPG created in Photoshop, than the problem should be solved/searched in the converter.

George

[davidedric]

But if she is seeing the same problem with her Canon, doesn't that eliminate d-lighting from the equation? Plus, she has told us it is "off".

Dave

[dje]

The Brightness setting Bettina refers to is in the Photoshop raw converter ACR, I believe. This was a feature of CS5 and used the so called "2010 process". "50" is the default setting for Brightness in this process. It was a rather strange arrangement that was replaced by the "2012 process" in CS6 (with no Brightness setting).