I have the feeling that my camera operates differently when doing exposure correction as opposed to setting a similar exposure manually. It loses shadow tones much more when correcting the automatic exposure.
My conclusion – the camera doesn’t really change the exposure when dialing in EV correction. It just shifts the recorded data up or down, thus resulting in loss of quality. If you need maximum information at a weird exposure setting, set it manually.
Examples below.
First, the normal exposure. 1/250 at f/4
The histogram looks very good.
Next, manual overexposure by two stops – 1/60 at f/4
The histogram doesn’t retain shadows, but isn’t too bad.
Third, the “easy” overexposure by two stops. 1/40 at f/2.8. There should be less than half a stop difference with the previous photo.
The histogram is bad.
For me, exposure correction on the digicam has lost its meaning. I used to have the left-right keys mapped to exposure, I now have them for changing the metering mode. Hopefully that will be a better use.
I ran some tests with underexposure as well. The histograms and photos look much better in those cases, thus I believe that adjusting down to save blown highlights shouldn’t otherwise compromise the quality.
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