Portrait photography tip: Overexpose your portrait

Thursday 6 August 2020, 20:10 by Elja Trum | 5,832 views | 3 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Slightly overexposing your portrait photos while shooting gives your images a fresh and simple look. Small imperfections in the skin disappear.

Vera, f/2.8, 1/125s, 400 ISO @ 53mm
Be careful not to go too far with the overexposure. You can never recover details that are pure white. When you save your photos in your camera in RAW format, you can recover more details afterwards than when you use JPEG.

You can also give a photo an overexposed look afterwards in Lightroom or Photoshop, but it is easiest if you do this directly in the camera. You can then easily perfect the effect during post-processing.

You can overexpose a photo fairly easily by using your camera's exposure compensation. This lets you set how many stops, usually adjustable in 1/3-stop increments, you want to overexpose compared with the exposure measured by your camera.

Usually, 1 to 2 stops of overexposure is more than enough.

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About the author

Elja Trum is the founder of Photofacts and online photography course website Photofacts Academy. He has been writing about photography since 2006. Elja is also the author of (Dutch) books on composition, black-and-white photography, flash photography and portrait photography.

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3 comments

Bas Fortuin wrote on Tuesday 11 August 2020 at 14:15 | reply
Underexposure can also achieve very beautiful effects. Especially in black and white..
Translated from Dutch.

Bernard De Cock wrote on Tuesday 11 August 2020 at 16:32 | reply
in my humble opinion the subject...the child, is not overexposed, but rather lit, but the space around it, the background, is overexposed. that is quite a big difference after all.
or not?
Translated from Dutch.

Dreamtimekeeper wrote on Tuesday 18 August 2020 at 10:17 | reply
In my experience, it was already standard in the analog days to always overexpose by 1 stop to get a little more detail in the blacks. Nice photo, by the way....
Translated from Dutch.

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