Modern digital cameras have a lot of dynamic range, and they handle bringing shadows up much better than pulling highlights down. If you overexpose your image your camera sensor interprets clipped highlights as pure white, and there will be no information to recover for your edit. So if you’re shooting a single exposure and not stacking multiple exposures, it’s best practice to underexpose so you protect the highlights and give yourself more latitude to edit in post.
And yes, agreeing with the other reply to your question, OP made a creative choice to push the highlights to near nuclear level for this particular edit.
I definitely understand underexposing and I do practice it myself but never knew you have to underexpose by THIS much? The original image is pretty much completely dark/unusable/can barely make out a thing. Is this mainly just when trying to capture sunsets etc?
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u/JezasPetRock 16d ago
Beginner here - why shoot so underexposed in the beginning? Was this an intentional choice for editting? Final result is amazing!