It seems that every time I shoot to the '0'centre line in any metering mode it looks great on the back of the camera and histogram, but when I get the images into light room the photos are always under exposed? I remember my D700 was always shooting on the hot side and used the fine tune in the menu to compensate. Is this the same for the D850?
How are you judging exposure for in camera and Lightroom. ?Screen appearance or histogram. As pointed out previously, brightness on the LCD is not good since the backlight brightness can vary.
I would suggest a simple test. Take exposures of a uniform white wall or other uniformly lit scene with the camera set to capture NEF+JPG. It doesn't matter if the target is white or grey, since the metered exposure will be the same; the camera meter has no way of knowing scene reflectance.
Look at the pixel value in the center of the images, with the in camera JPG and Lightroom raw conversions using exposure 0, and exposure -0.35. The -0.35 value is to correct for the
hidden exposure correction (see link) that LR applies for the D850. If you have Rawdigger, look at the raw pixel value and determine percent sensor saturation.
With my D850 set to sRGB and using the Nikon Standard picture control, I get an sRGB value of 132 from the in camera JPEGs. With Lightroom I get 135 with no exposure adjustment and 115 with -0.35 exposure correction. Mid-grey in sRGB is 118. The values from the camera and LR with no exposure correction are slightly hot, while with the -0.35 EV correction the pixel value is very close to mid-grey.
Using Rawdigger, I get a raw pixel value of 1380. Saturation occurs at around 15780, so saturation is 9%. According to Iliah Borg, the Nikon D850 is calibrated to get a saturation of 10% under these conditions. I conclude that my D850 is exposing correctly.
Cheers,
Bill