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Originally Posted by Mr. Pickles
You really need to watch the darkness of images. A lot of folks tend to think that you should underexpose the shot, and fix it in RAW conversion or using the Shadow/Highlight tool. Actually the S/H tool is a pretty bad way to fix it, as the more you increase the blacks to brighten them up, the more NOISE you introduce into the image. You may have to run a Noise remover on them if you really underexposed the shot.
Nothing can really replace a properly exposed image. The best way to get that is to know alot about photography, or use the histogram to check the images.
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I usually try S/H on every image (JPEG or RAW). It's surprising how often a bit of shadow lightening (the S part) can help a picture (plus the H part can help dull blown highlights just a bit for something like flash glare on a forehead). I try to use S/H lightly (the default is way too much) and maybe because of that haven't seen big problems with noise but then again I'm mostly doing things for presentation on the web plus I tend to shoot at the lowest possible ISO. There's a light version of S/H in elements 3. I couldn't image life without S/H at this point!
I'm not saying you shouldn't try to get it right at the camera but when you don't (or can't because you didn't take the picture or the dynamic range of the scene was just too great for the camera) it's S/H to the rescue. Various raw converters have shadow and highlight knobs but so far I haven't found one that I liked quite as well as plain old S/H (although Nikon Picture Project has an Auto Enhance button that does a surprisingly good job on my somewhat dark d70 jpeg images).
If I had to choose between an under-exposed image and an over-exposed image I'd take the dark one every time (and then try to fix it in post). I just don't know of many good ways to fix a blown image (especially if it was shot JPEG). What we really need is a tool where we can say things like "please bring back my sky but leave the rest of the image alone, thank you". Maybe when Photoshop AI ships
Just my two cents as someone who has to deal with a lot of fouled up images (mine and those sent to me by others).