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A Short Course Book

Using Your Digital Camera
A Guide To Great Photographs

Using Histograms Shutterstock®

Photos
Most serious photo-editing programs let you use a histogram as a
guide when editing your images. However, since most image
One free photo &
corrections can be diagnosed by looking at a histogram, it helps to vector per week.
look at it while still in a position to reshoot the image. It's for this Download any
reason that many cameras let you display histograms on the photo, use
monitor in playback mode or while reviewing an image you have forever.
just taken. A few cameras even let you see a histogram as you are www.Shutterstock.com
composing an image.

Evaluating Histograms Be a Web

As you've seen, each pixel in an image can be set to any of 256 Designer
levels of brightness from pure black (0) to pure white (255) and a Learn HTML,
histogram graphs which of those levels of brightness are in the Dreamweaver Join
image and how they are distributed. The horizontal axis of a Arena Animation
histogram represents the range of brightness from 0 (shadows) on
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the left to 255 (highlights) on the right. Think of it as a line with www.arena-multimedia.com
256 spaces on which to stack pixels of the same brightness. Since
these are the only values that can be captured by the camera, the
Click to explore horizontal line also represents the image's maximum potential
histograms. tonal range or contrast. Aputure Gigtube
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The vertical axis represents the number of pixels that have each of
the 256 brightness values. The higher the line coming up from the Save: Digital
horizontal axis, the more pixels there are at that level of brightness. Cameras
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To read the histogram, you look at the distribution of pixels. Here

are some things to look for.

Many photos look best when there are some pixels at every
position because these images are using the entire tonal range.
In many images, pixels are grouped together and occupy only a
part of the available tonal range. These images lack contrast
because the difference between the brightest and darkest areas
isn't as great as it could be. However, this can be fixed in your
photo-editing program by using commands that spread the pixels
so they cover the entire available tonal range. These controls allow

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you to adjust the shadow, midtone, and highlight areas

independently without affecting the other areas of the image. This
lets you lighten or darken selected areas of your images without
loosing detail. The only pixels that can't be fixed in this way are
those that have been "clipped" to pure white or black.

EVALUATING HISTOGRAMS

If the histogram shows most pixels toward the left (darker) side
of the graph, use exposure compensation to add exposure.
If the histogram shows most pixels toward the right (lighter) side
of the graph, use exposure compensation to reduce exposure.

The original image (top) is flat and its histogram indicates only part
of the tonal range is being used. A photo-editing program was then
used to expand the tonal range (bottom). You can see the change in
both the image and in the histogram.

Highlight Warning

One thing you want to avoid is overexposing highlights so they

become so bright, or "clipped", they loose details. To help you
avoid this many cameras a highlight warning when you review your
images. Overexposed areas of the image that have no detail blink

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or are outlined in color.

Clipped Pixels
Click to explore how
overexposed highlights When a histogram shows pixels at the extreme ends of the range,
blink. in the 0 and 255 positions, it means details in those tones are lost
or "clipped" in your image. These extremes should be reserved for
specular highlights (reflections) and small dark shadows. When
large areas lack detail an image suffers.

In the top image you can tell from the histogram that some of the
highlight pixels are pure white and hence clipped. There is nothing
you can do later to display details in the area of these pixels.
However, if you reshoot the scene at a different exposure you can
shift the pixels to the left and avoid the clipping (bottom).

To avoid clipping and better place the tonal values in subsequent

shots, you use exposure compensation. Increasing exposure shifts
pixels to the highlight, or right end of the histogram. Decreasing
exposure shifts them the other way. Unless you are deliberately
trying to get pure whites or pure blacks, you should shift the pixels
if any are being clipped. This then gives you a chance to correct
the image in your photo-editing program.

This series of photos was taken one stop apart using exposure
compensation. As the exposure increased, pixels on the histogram
shifted right. You can tell from the way the fan blades blur that the
shutter speed was changed to change the exposure. In the image
where it was faster, the image is darker and the blades are frozen.
As slower speeds were used to increase the exposure, the images
get lighter and the blades more blurred.

Sample Histograms

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The way a histogram looks depends on the scene you're shooting

and how you expose it. There's no such thing as a good or bad
histogram. Whether a particular histogram is good or bad depends
on what you are trying to accomplish. If fact, you may prefer to
trust your visual reaction to the image more than the very numeric
image data provided by a histogram. However, even if you never
use a histogram, you can learn about digital photography by
understanding what a histogram can show about an image.
Following are some histograms from good images along with a
brief summary of what each histogram reveals.

In this well exposed portrait there is a fairly even distribution of

values in both the shadow and highlight areas of the image. There
are no pure blacks in the image as shown by the gap at the far left
end of the scale.

This brown moth on a gray card has most of its values in the
midrange. That's why there are a number of high vertical lines
grouped in the middle of the horizontal axis.

This high-key fog scene has most of its values toward the highlight
end of the scale. There are no really dark values in the image. The
image uses only a little more than half the camera's dynamic range.

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This low-key scene has the majority of its values in the shadow
area with another large grouping around middle gray. There are
wide levels of brightness that have only a few pixels.

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