Exposure Diagnostics: Check Your LCD Brightness Level

It is important that you ensure that the LCD on your camera reads out correctly. That way, when you review images after exposure you can be sure that they are a true reflection of what you have recorded on your memory card.

Within your camera menu is an item called “LCD Brightness.” You may not have seen it but it’s in there, usually within the Setup menu. Check your instruction book or toggle through the Menu until you find it. You will see a sliding scale of plus and minus. Open an image on the LCD from your memory card. Turn the brightness scale plus or minus using a command or control dial and see what happens. The image gets lighter and darker. If you have Live View you can do this while viewing an image prior to exposure. 

Make sure your brightness setting is right in the middle of the scale. Make a series of test shots at different settings (over- and underexposed, that is) and check them on the LCD. Then download the images onto a computer, and check them on the screen. Make sure the well-exposed image is the one made at the middle setting.

There are some instances when you might want to raise or lower the LCD brightness level. You might want to do this when shooting in extremes of brightness—either in very bright daylight when the monitor might be hard to read or in very low light when you need more illumination to work within the menu. However, you will not want any level of LCD brightness other than being centered on the brightness scale when shooting under normal lighting conditions. Also, be sure to check this scale if you had changed it to adapt to lighting conditions on a previous shoot. Once set the scale stays put unless you change it, even when you turn off the camera.

This is how this image of a set of dock pilings showed up after exposure on the LCD—too bright, right? Lowering exposure is indicated, but in fact doing so resulted in a very underexposed, unusable shot.  This is what can happen if you fail to insure that the LCD monitor brightness is centered. It pays to check this periodically, as it may have shifted without your knowledge or if you forgot to change it when you might have brightened it for viewing reasons on some other occasion. (By the way, the same goes for ISO settings—always check that it’s what you want for the shoot at hand. You may have been working in low light the night before at ISO 1600 and forget to turn it lower for work in daylight the next day.)

Here’s how the playback on the LCD looked with the brightness set correctly. You can imagine what it might have looked like if exposure was less—the subtle shades and colors would be lost. Doing a quick check on your LCD brightness level can make a big difference in how your images turn out and prevent unwanted exposure miscues.