Ask PAT: Display too bright

I got another question about a problem that many people underestimate. The brightness of the display doesn’t seem to be right. You take pictures in the studio or outside in the current bad weather, realize that the camera overexposes for strange reasons – or even in the studio the pictures in M are somehow too bright – and adjust the exposure. And then you sit at home at the calibrated monitor and have to pull up all the images by 0.3EV or 0.7 EV.

Or vice versa. You’re outside in glaring brightness and all the pictures look too dark on the display. So expose brighter. And then adjust everything down again on the PC afterwards.

There are three remedies for this problem:

• Remember this and expose 0.7EV more or less than you actually think in the respective situations.
• Adjust the display brightness in the camera’s default settings accordingly.
• Look through the viewfinder.

The reason is simple: the eye adapts to the changing brightness, but the display does not. Normally this is around 0.3EV to 0.7EV. This is not dramatic. You can adjust this in RAW. It can be annoying if you take photos at night using the display. With LiveComposite or LiveTime. Then you can’t look through the viewfinder because of camera shake. You can easily misjudge by 2 f-stops. The only thing that helps is a brightness of -7 in the default settings. (On the OM-1 this is the monitor calibration in the wrench menu 3. monitor/sound/connection)