Does crop factor change my exposure settings?
No — your exposure settings stay exactly the same. Crop factor is purely a framing and, once matched for framing, a depth-of-field multiplier; the meter, the aperture and the ISO dial don't know or care what sensor is behind the lens.
For the actual mechanism — why an f/2.8 lens genuinely gathers the same light per unit area on any sensor size — see the one question crop factor never answers. Some sources also publish an 'equivalent aperture' derived from that same crop factor, and it's a genuinely real number — it just isn't an exposure number. See what that number actually means for the exact calculation.
Why Smaller Sensors Still Have a Low-Light Reputation Anyway
The real reasons trace to total light-gathering area (a full-frame sensor's roughly 864mm² captures more total light than APS-C's roughly 367mm² for the same scene and exposure, a real 2.36x area difference) and to a smaller sensor needing a physically wider real aperture to match full frame's background separation at the same framing — both genuine physical effects, but neither one changes what shutter speed and ISO a given real f-number needs for correct exposure on either format.
See field-of-view and depth-of-field equivalence kept explicitly separate from exposure in the Crop-Factor & Equivalence Converter.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does my in-camera meter never mention crop factor at all?
Because the meter reads actual light through the actual aperture at the actual sensor, and that physical relationship between aperture, shutter speed, ISO and correct exposure genuinely doesn't depend on sensor size at all — crop factor simply isn't a relevant input to what the meter is measuring in the first place.
Is there any situation where sensor size does affect a meter reading?
Not through crop factor directly — metering differences between cameras come from metering algorithm design and sensor technology generation, not from sensor physical size changing the fundamental aperture-to-exposure relationship. Two cameras with identical real settings in identical light always target the identical exposure, regardless of sensor size.