Turn this setting OFF on your SONY Cameras - Under exposing on Sony cameras

Hey guys, I just have a quick little video for the Sony shooters among us. I would say for the last like six months, I've been chronically underexposing my photos using my Sony a seven R three. And I could not figure out why I was getting such a different preview on the back of my screen than I was getting once I imported into the light room. So let me describe the problem that I have and see if this sounds familiar. So I'll be taking a photo. My picture style will be in just standard. Everything looks properly exposed on the back of my camera. My histogram looks appropriate for the scene I imported in the light room. And then once I open it up in the develop module, suddenly the shadows get much darker and I discover, Oh, I've actually severely underexposed my photo. Now what was happening was there's actually a setting inside the camera that only affects the JPEG preview that you see on the back of your camera. It would also affect the JPEG if you're shooting in JPEG, but it does not affect the raw file. And as a result, you're seeing a preview with lifted shadows where it's basically trying to even out the dynamic range of the scene. Let me show you where it is in the menu system so you can go in and turn it off. That way you can actually get an accurate histogram and you can start properly exposing your photos again. So if you go into the menu system and you go to the first red camera tab and then go over to the 12th page, this is 12 of 14. The third item down will be called dynamic range optimizer. So it could be different in your particular menu system, but what you're going to be looking for is DRO or dynamic range optimizer. Essentially what this is doing is it gives you gives the JPEGs a flatter, more lifted shadow look. It's really useful if you're doing video, actually. I prefer it to be on when I'm doing video by default. Typically it's set to auto and it's basically going to lift the shadows if you're shooting in a high dynamic range scene and then you can go through and you can change the level of that dynamic range optimizer. But I prefer to leave it off when I'm shooting stills. That way the histogram that I'm seeing on the back of my camera is actually accurate. There's nothing more embarrassing as a landscape photographer educator than preaching to my workshop about how they need to expose to the right and make sure that they're checking their histogram. And then when we go to look at my files for post-processing, they're all super underexposed. That's what had been happening. I had this dynamic range optimizer turned on and as a result I was severely underexposing all my photos because my histogram, which is based off of that JPEG preview was inaccurate. So now with this turned back off, I'm going to have a more accurate histogram and start to actually see what it is that I'm capturing. Hope this helps the Sony shooters among us. And I guess I'll see you guys in the next video. Take it easy, everybody.