ETTR: Am I doing it wrong?

[Matheus]

Hello guys from ML community, a few days ago I was shooting RAW on my 70D and decided to experiment with ETTL, to see if I could improve my noise performance on shadow parts of the image.

On my first attempts it worked amazingly, and I could get some very nice shadow detail in a high-contrast night scene I was shooting, but on my later attempts I've noticed that highlights were looking washed (instead of having detail, being just gray) even after about -1.0EV exposure compensation on ACR... So I guess I must be doing something wrong (either when selecting exposure, or during conversion) but I can't find out where, after all, I thought DSLR cameras had atleast some extra dynamic range, specially on highlights...

[dmilligan]

Sounds like you ETTR'ed to far and clipped your highlights. Zebras are very helpful to prevent this. IMO zebras are actually more useful than the histogram when ETTRing. You can see what areas are getting clipped and move your exposure down just below the point that they don't clip, also you can easily ignore specular highlights. Some things you don't care if they clip (like bright lights or the sun), some things you do. Zebras show exactly what is clipping so you can clip the things that don't matter and not clip the things that do. Hard to do that with just a histogram. You can use raw zebras in both image review and LV.

[Matheus]

Sounds like you ETTR'ed to far and clipped your highlights. Zebras are very helpful to prevent this. IMO zebras are actually more useful than the histogram when ETTRing. You can see what areas are getting clipped and move your exposure down just below the point that they don't clip, also you can easily ignore specular highlights. Some things you don't care if they clip (like bright lights or the sun), some things you do. Zebras show exactly what is clipping so you can clip the things that don't matter and not clip the things that do. Hard to do that with just a histogram. You can use raw zebras in both image review and LV.

Yeah, I'd love to have zebras for looking better at the exposure, but since they are only on ML and there's no working version of it for the 70D, then I had to mess only with the histogram...
Maybe I've just misunderstood what RAW/ETTL can and can't do and went too far on it.. I was trying to fix a xmas tree full of white lights, I knew it could become too overexposed, but thought it would only about +1EV then what I was exposing for, something recoverable..

Anyways, thanks for your help, dmilligan!