Nikon D600 For Dummies

Sorting through Your Camera's Exposure-Correction Tools

In addition to the normal controls over aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, your camera offers a collection of tools that enable you to solve tricky exposure problems. The next several sections introduce you to these features.

Applying Exposure Compensation

When you set your camera to the P, S, or A modes, you can enjoy autoexposure support but still retain some control over the final exposure. If you think that the image the camera produced is too dark or too light, you can use Exposure Compensation, which enables you to tell the camera to produce a darker or lighter exposure than what its autoexposure mechanism thinks is appropriate. Here's how it works:

• Exposure Compensation settings are stated in terms of EV values, as in EV +2.0. Possible values range from EV +5.0 to EV -5.0. (EV stands for exposure value.)

  Each full number on the EV scale represents an exposure shift of one stop. See the earlier sidebar “Exposure stops: How many do you want to see?” to see how you can tweak the increments of EV adjustment the camera offers.

• A setting of EV 0.0 results in no exposure adjustment.
• For a brighter image, raise the EV value. The higher you go, the brighter the image becomes.
• For a darker image, lower the EV value.

As an example, see the first image in Figure 7-19. The initial exposure selected by the camera left the balloon ...