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Frozen Pinewood River

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There has been an issue I have been having some time now with my D7000. I shoot images with it, with any lens. When I review it in the camera's LCD, it's just right. However, when I view it in my mac or any other computer, it's darker! And it's just not the case with one image, it is the case with all of my images and my lenses, no matter what setting I use!

Is there something I can do about it? I tried different settings for my monitors but it still yields darker images, even if I shoot in whatever format (raw or jpeg).

Thanks in advance!

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Just turn down the LCD brightness? The alternative is to check the histograms to make sure the pic is exposed well, rather than just relying on the preview image –  Dreamager Sep 7 '12 at 12:16
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2 Answers

A back-of-camera LCD is not designed, and should not be used, for gauging exposure based on the brightness of the LCD. As noted by Dreamager in a comment, you can adjust the brightness of the LCD and that might better approximate how things look on your computer. Whether or not your computer is displaying an image accurately depends on if it's been calibrated or not.

To gauge exposure, use the histogram feature of the camera, which provides a graphical representation of the tones in the image from dark to light. There are lots of questions and answers about histograms here on this site, but here's a popular and detailed one:

How and why do you use an image histogram?

The histogram will allow you to identify if you're clipping highlights (very overexposed), blocking up the shadows (likely underexposed), or somewhere in between. That said, one could also argue that there's no "correct" exposure and that it's up to the photographer, but that's an entirely different discussion :)

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Also check your settings. If you are using Active D lighting, then images WILL be darker. However by using the Nixon software to import from card and export again the settings can become part of the new raw. If you import any other way the ADL won't come through.

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