When friends come over we like to take a group photo. Ginny is normally the photographer. For quite a while now her photos are turning out very dark. When I pull them into Lightroom it is obvious that they are somewhat under exposed judging from the histograms. Of course, the histograms that the camera displays when you use the playback button are the same as seen in Lightroom, but the image on the camera monitor looks just right. Ginny uses the appearance of the image on the monitor to adjust her exposures. I kept asking her to have a look at the histograms, but she said it is too much a bother.

So the light came on in the attic. On all our cameras I had set the screen brightness to the highest value because we take tons of photos outdoors and a bright screen helps a lot. So I set up an experiment (its that scientist in me kicking in.) I left Ginny's G5-X at the usual brightness (high), I set my G5-X MkII to the lowest brightness and I loaded the photo into Lightroom. All three were using the same image. In the photo today you can see Lightroom in the background, my camera on the left and Ginny's camera on the right. In the top right you can see the histogram for this image. It seems that my camera and Lightroom were displaying the image at about the same intensity. Ginny's camera makes it look much brighter. That difference was fooling her. So I left both cameras on the lowest screen brightness. We are having friends over next Sunday so we will get a chance to try the new settings.