Exposure is not how dark or how light an image looks!

Good point. That's why I wrote "relatively;" otherwise I'm "underexposing" practically every time I don't use my CC40M filter, and even more so every time I turn on Auto-ISO.

I was confused by your use of the word relatively. I thought you meant wrt the green channels.

It does if you shoot film.

You may want to refer back to the original post in this thread; the first half of which, discusses exposure as it relates to film.

dprevived.com/t/exposure-is-not-how-dark-or-how-light-an-image-looks/495/post/3288/

I hope film can be discussed on film forums, and not in a casual manner.
dprevived.com/t/odd-film-analogies/1033/
Wrong film paradigm is why we don't have raw histogram and a mess with ISO. It also causes inadequate camera metering and controls.

Returning to the original post in this thread...

OK

OK, exposure and processing have roles to play in shaping the response curve. You could also gain and have excessive contrast in addition to losing it, but it's reasonable so far.

None of this controlled? Well, there's some latitude in the image creation path which precedes making a print, but there is a noticeable impact on the appearance of your final print — including how dark or light — if the exposure is too far off!

How dark or light prints will look is not "determined" at print time. The critical factors in that determination began with the exposure used at the time of image capture and proceeded from there.

You can easily make prints of varying quality, lightness, and darkness from a thin, normal or dense negative. Making high quality prints from a thin, normal or dense negative is not all that easy. Some degree of over or under exposure allows for satisfactory prints; but the greater the degree to which exposure is off (over or under), the worse your print quality will be.

Please don't tell this to beginners as it implies that exposure plays no role as you've worded it in this sentence. How you expose an image; how you process an image; how you print an image; contributes to how dark or how light an image looks! All the links in the imaging chain combine in the end to determine your final image quality.

I'm generally in favor of simplifying explanations for a broad audience, but you can over simplify to the point of information becoming muddled and unhelpful.

Mr. Borg does bring up an interesting point. Suppose you are shooting a landscape where the dominant color is green. Assume you are shooting at base ISO, and have picked the maximum exposure that doesn't blow out important highlights.

On a whim, you look at raw data from the capture. You happen to notice that the green pixels (those behind the green filters in your Bayer Pattern sensor) have a much higher exposure than the red and blue pixels. Perhaps if you increased the exposure by one stop the blown pixels would all be green pixels, and none of the red or blue pixels would be blown.

If your goal is to maximize exposure, you could put a filter on the lens that reduces the green light by one stop, and leaves the red and blue light untouched. You could then open up the aperture by one stop, or use a one stop longer shutter speed.

The net result is that your green pixels stay at the same exposure, but you have increased the exposure in the red and blue pixels by one stop.

By increasing the exposure on half your pixels (25% of the pixels are red, 25% blue) by one stop, you have increased total light captured by 1/2 stop.You are now capturing more total light, and therefore will have a less noisy final image. Yes, you would need to compensate for the filter when processing the raw data, but that's a doable task.

So if your goal is to do everything you can to maximize the light captured, then this is a technique you should consider.

On the other hand, at some point the quality of an image is more than good enough. You reach a point where additional increases in quality do not justify the resources needed to get those increases.

All real world captures have noise. If the noise is low enough, then you may be able to measure the noise, but it won't be visible to the unaided human eye. One can make a reasonable case, that once you reach the point where the noise is not visible, there is little benefit to further reductions in noise.

Perhaps you are shooting without a filter, and your images have no visible noise. You could use Mr. Borg's technique to further reduce measurable noise, but that incremental reduction may not justify the time, effort and resources needed. Of course, whether or not that additional reduction is worth it, is going to depend on the situation. In some situations, you may need to squeeze every drop of performance from your camera. In other cases, you may be able to use a simpler workflow, and still get results that meet your needs.

You are correct in that overly dense or overly thin negatives hurt image quality. That's why the goal is generally to get good negative density.

Suppose we have a overly thin negative. Suppose it is about 2 stops too thin. When I go to make a print in the darkroom, I can stop the enlarger lens down, and/or use a shorter print exposure time. I can then get a print that doesn't look too dark. It won't be a good print. It may be lacking in contrast or shadow detail, however it won't be a dark print.

I can also take a negative with normal density, and use it to make a dark print, or a light print.

While negative density can dramatically affect image quality, it does not determine how dark or light the resulting print will be.

In retrospect, you do have a good point. I probably should have included a disclaimer that while exposure does not determine how dark or light the image looks, it does affect the quality of the final image. With film, the highest quality was generally achieved when the midtones of the image were near the middle of the film's "S" shaped response curve. With digital, the highest quality is generally achieved with the maximum exposure that doesn't blow out important highlights.

I hope individuals and their discussions can range freely from casual and informal to technical and formal. You'll decide in what manner you wish to discuss subjects for yourself and others will do the same.

Thank you for the easy to understand explanation.

In it, you make a good point that there could come a point where squeezing out that extra incremental amount of performance from the camera and the extra post processing as a consequence does not always result in a visible or worthwhile benefit in image quality.

Especially with today's modern AI driven noise reduction apps coupled with minimising visible noise in the raw data, visible noise in my images when viewed on screen or in print is not an issue for me.

Good prints with good tonality, from their subjective viewpoint, are what photographers from amateur beginners to seasoned professionals are trying to produce.

If the print has poor contrast and tonality, it will appear too dark in some image areas and too light in others. Whether or not it's considered too dark or light overall will be a subjective decision.

You can make prints to suit your judgement as to how light or dark you feel they should be, within the limitations of what you have to work with in the negative and what you are able to produce from it.

The contrast and tonality of the print will determine if you have the shadows as dark or highlights as light as you desire in your image. Contrast and tonality seem to have gotten lost in the discussion of light and dark.

If one thinks "Beginners' Questions" on a site that is mostly dedicated to digital is an appropriate place to bring up film, I have the right to say that it is problematic. As film is not something that most understand well, it may be a good practice to give things a peer review before lecturing beginners, simply to avoid spreading misconceptions and wrong analogies.

You have the right to say whatever you wish, as do we all.

I suggest beginners visit their local library and browse thru the photography section.

Not good enough if they are subjected to misinformation here. Comparisons between film and digital demand deep understanding of film, specifically latent image formation and processing, and local library photography section isn't where one can find adequate coverage of the matter. Not to mention such comparisons are often totally unnecessary. They add nothing and only confuse the reader.

Here is an idea: a post with recommended technical books that contain correct information about exposure, ISO, equivalency, diffraction, etc.

"A question that often arises is why some Kodak films have ISO ratings while others have EI (Exposure Index ratings), or some may have neither." -- 125px.com/docs/techpubs/kodak/cis185-1996_11.pdf

Thank you for the link to the article.
However, I was thinking of books you could find in a library.

The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, The Manual of Photography, Way Beyond Monochrome, Michael Langford all give very good information, but they are not enough. Libraries are not enough. I don't know, for example, of any book on equivalency that fits this age.

AA's The Negative.

Davis' Beyond the Zone System

Joseph James' equivalency posts.