The best solution to “too little light” is to add light to the scene or to shoot in a different location.
If you can’t do either of these things, you might decide to make the camera more sensitive to low light. You can try turning the gain up, opening the camera aperture, and lowering the shutter speed. Each of these steps will change the look of the final image.
Another option to try is to recover an unexposed image in post production by adjusting contrast, brightness and color.
Too much light
Figure 2 Too much light.
When you have too much light highlights and bright spots will be overexposed (blown out). An area that is blown out has no digital information within it and cannot be recovered in post production.
The only solution is to reduce the amount of light coming into the lens.
If you are shooting in available light you might move the subject to into the shade, or wait until a different time of day, perhaps the twilight just around sunset.
Other ways you can reduce the amount of light entering the camera are adding ND filters, reducing the aperture, or increasing the shutter speed.
White Balance Problems
You know you have a white balance problem when your image is tinted the wrong color. The image may have an ugly blue, green, orange, yellow or golden tint.
The usual cure for this problem is to white balance your camera. (Chapter 9 of Digital Video Secrets tells how to set white balance.)
Occasionally, you can correct a white balance problem in post production.
Figure 3 White Balance Problems.
Lighting has the wrong ratio, direction or color
If the colors are right and you have enough light but the image is still not pleasing, you have a classic lighting problem.
The image may be brightly lit but flat, without shadows or modeling—the classic “evening news” lighting. Or the subject may be to harshly lit, with extreme shadows.
Pleasing lighting is about the amount, direction and color of the light that falls on a scene. Good lighting will create shadows that model the scene and give it visual interest and apparent depth.
The best contrast ratio for faces is about 4:1 (2 f stops difference between brightest and darkest areas of the image).
The classic lighting setup for creating this effect is three-point lighting. In three point lighting, the person is lighted from the back (back light), side (fill light), and front (key light) with three separate lights.
