In a blog post last week, I talked about the use of the screen brightness settings to ensure you get as good a view as possible on the back of the LCD screen.

Now, as I explained, with the ordinary view, the screen (as good as they are) is not perfect for judging exposures. Ambient light, reflections and angle of view can all affect what you see and make it difficult to see what the exposure is like.

There is however another tool you can use, even beyond the histogram that we covered in another post. This tool is the highlight alert setting. It's found in the menu in the blue playback section of the menu options. It's quick and easy to set and it provides a very useful quick check to see whether you have overexpoed any highlights. Having it set to on simply menas that if you take an image and the highlight are overexposed in any area, they will flash when you review the image.

Simple, quick and easy to set. However, depending on what you shoot, you might not want to leave it on all the time. I was chatting to a wedding photographer the other day and he says he turns it off when he's going to show clients images on the back of the camera to avoid them asking what it is. 

The real point about highlert alert though is that you shouldn't get caught up in it. If there is an overexposed section of an image, it' not the end of the world as long as you decided it should be overexposed - when shooting a portrait against a bright backlight for example.

Have a play round with it and maybe even et it in the My Menu screen for easy access.

Hit the comments with your thoughts - do you use it or not?