How to Properly Expose to the Right

A lot of time you'll hear it people say, expose to the right as a means of ensuring proper exposure. Basically what this means is you give extra exposure to your image without actually overexposing or clipping your highlights. So you're going to push the graph of the histogram as far to the right as possible without having all the data bunched up on the right. The reason for exposing to the right is that digital camera sensors record more data and highlight in bright areas of the image than they do in the darker shadows. And when you have less data you end up with more digital noise. So digital noise lurks in the shadows it lurks in the dark parts of the image. So you want to push that exposure as far to the right as possible without overexposing your highlights because if you overexpose your highlights you can't recover that data. Now, when you do properly expose to the right, if you look at the image on your camera's LCD screen it may look overly bright and washed out to you, but don't worry, As long as you haven't overexposed your highlights you can pull that image back when you're doing your raw processing and bring it down to the proper exposure. Not only can you get the proper exposure without any penalty, but you'll end up with a much cleaner file.