Kodak's Exposure Compensation Slider

As most digital shooters know, the accuracy of digital exposures has often been compared to shooting chromes (and rightfully so).  Since there is seemingly very little latitude for exposure error, accuracy is a must.  Although accuracy will always yield the best quality, Kodak provided the users of Kodak Professional DCS 3xx, 5xx, and 6xx series digital cameras a little (welcomed) added relief, the "Exposure Compensation" slider.

At first, some skeptics felt that this was simply a new interface for tweaking levels or curves with a simpler look.  However, the functionality of this feature goes much deeper.  Kodak's engineers designed this feature to utilize the otherwise discarded extraneous data bits that contain valuable exposure information.   Quite simply, this feature puts the Kodak Professional DCS cameras among the highest (utilized) latitude digital cameras on the market.

We were interested to see just how effective this feature is so we did a test.  Using a standard Kodak Q14 chart, we made eight exposures ranging from +3 stops to -4 stops (including a perfect exposure).  Then, we used Kodak's Exposure Compensation feature to "correct" the images.  This rendered the images from +2 stops to -2 stops theoretically "perfect" after compensation.  The exposures outside of this range were corrected to the maximum extent of this feature (i.e., -3 stops corrected +2 stops, effectively rendering -1 stop after correction).   For the scope of this test, we did not perform any Photoshop levels or curves compensations.  By doing so, we could have further corrected those images outside of the +/- 2 stop range to a theoretically perfect exposure.

As you view the results, bear in mind that you are looking at an eight stop range of exposures.  Knowing this, the results are quite impressive!

Click Image for a Larger View

The patches on the left are the "compensated" patches.  The patches on the right are "as exposed" without compensation of any kind (very much like overexposed/underexposed film would look without compensation).

Thanks Kodak!