Exposing to the Right: Co Everyone Gets Wrong

Exposing to the right is one of the best ways to set yourself up for success in your color grade. But there is one critical detail that many of us overlook. Let’s take a look inside DaVinci Resolve and see if we can get a better understanding of exposing to the right.

Make some noise

To see the benefits of exposing to the right, let’s look at a series of left, right, and middle-exposed images. We have five images in our timeline, and I have exposed each image differently and then normalized it in Resolve.

These five images have been exposed differently and then normalized in Resolve.

The middle image, image three, is exposed to the middle of the exposure range. When I say “middle,” I mean that the image has a normal, healthy exposure that is neither underexposed nor overexposed. What I want to focus on today is image texture and noise, so let’s zoom in on this image to see the texture change as we go through different levels of exposure.

Comparing shot number three to shot number four.

As you can see, our normal “middle” exposure has some noise, but it’s not an excessive amount. Using the slider above, compare the middle exposure to shot number four, which I exposed one stop to the right. If you look at the lampshade to the right of the subject’s face, you can see there is not as much noise in shot number four compared to shot number three. That’s because when we expose to the right, we get less noise than if we have a middle exposure.

Pull it back

Let’s look at what we’re doing in Resolve to normalize our exposure. I exposed shot number four to the right and then used the node tree to pull the exposure back by one photometric stop to compensate. When we’re talking about exposing to the right, we’re not saying that brighter images are better than darker images. Rather, we are saying that exposing images to the right gives us some extra benefits when we get to the color grade.

The node tree normalizes