If the images are properly exposed, why do they require +50 brightness...? Shouldn't it default to 0 brightness?

Thanks

No, the Brightness scale is set to be "normalized" at 50...so you can lower the brightness.

The brightness scale goes from -150 to +150.

Well, for sure it would have been more intuitive for a newcomer to name this default position "0"... But now, I think it is much too late, and we are so used to think "50=0" that it would confuse most of us to rename it.

If the OP finds that disturbing, he can always throw in a feature request.

Rick, the problem is that our visual system (eyes and brain) do not respond linearly to light energy, unlike digital camera sensors. Even with a well exposed image, a tone curve adjustment is required to produce an image that appears more natural to the human eye.


You can turn off the brightness portion of Camera Raw's tone curve entirely by setting Brightness to zero. However you'll probably find that the image doesn't look so good when you do that.

Which is why it was decided to "normalize" the Brightness to 50...(I think I said that already :~)

All of the numbers in Camera Raw are "defaults", you can change them to ANYTHING you want and save those settings as new defaults (and also reset back to the normal defaults if you screw them up). So, it would be useful to get the hang out of using the settings and if you ALWAYS want a setting to be different by default, change it.