Here’s how to instantly improve your snow photos by turning your snow from dull grey to snow white with a simple exposure adjustment.

When you take a photograph and let your camera calculate the exposure automatically it will try to get as much of the scene as possible to lie between totally black (underexposed) and totally white (overexposed). This works well in most situations but when you’re photographing snow the camera still tries to go through the same process and all the white snow makes it think that it should reduce the exposure resulting in dull grey snow like in this picture by MaximeF…

snow by MaximeF

To get bright white snow photos at the time of taking the photograph, simply set your cameras exposure compensation (usually called EV in camera menus) to increase the exposure by about +1. The actual value you use will depend on the exposure you want and the amount of snow in your scene.

If you prefer you can tweak your exposure once you get home in the warm. If you shoot RAW, you can simply apply the same exposure compensation through your RAW processing utility. If not then y0u can use Photoshop’s “Exposure” adjustment layer* to make the same adjustment. Here’s the same photo with a +1 EV adjustment…

Snow with +1EV adjustment

For this particular photo I think a bit more exposure would look good. Here it is with a +1.3EV adjustment…

Snow with +1.3EV adjustment

* A “Levels” or “Curves” adjustment layer can also be used to tweak the exposure of your photo to get the snow looking snow white again.