If you've been using digital cameras for some time now, chances are you have already seen lots of histograms. They are shown by most cameras and imaging software and they are a very powerful tool to review your exposure. Today we are going to take a look at them and we're going to answer the question:
How do I interpret a Histogram?
A histogram is a graphical representation of a series of data, it's not only used in digital photography but also in many statistics representations. Every column in a histogram represents a case and its height represents how often this case is presented. Translated into digital photography, every column represents a tonal value, while its height represents how often this value is present in our picture.
The light values in a histogram go from 0, at the left meaning completely dark to 255, at the right meaning completely white.
This means, if a picture is dark the columns in the left will be higher, because a bigger part of the image will be contained in them.
It might sound complicated but let me show you some examples to make it easy.
How do I interpret a Histogram?
A histogram is a graphical representation of a series of data, it's not only used in digital photography but also in many statistics representations. Every column in a histogram represents a case and its height represents how often this case is presented. Translated into digital photography, every column represents a tonal value, while its height represents how often this value is present in our picture.
The light values in a histogram go from 0, at the left meaning completely dark to 255, at the right meaning completely white.
This means, if a picture is dark the columns in the left will be higher, because a bigger part of the image will be contained in them.
It might sound complicated but let me show you some examples to make it easy.
This is the histogram of a normally exposed image. The tones are well distributed along the histogram from the darker to the lighter areas, there is a very high peak at the brightest end of the histogram showing the overexposed area caused by the light at the lower right corner of the image. These peaks are something to avoid, since parts of the image with so bright tones will end up just white without any appreciable detail. In this image though this is tolerable since the burned area is quite small. Also, we can see a wider peak in the bright area of the histogram caused, that shows the bright area on the wall that's being lit by the light.
What this histogram is telling us about the image is that it has a burned area, it has well distributed tones and an important area of the scene is brighter than normal.
Let's take a look at a completely different Histogram.
This image is was intentionally underexposed to give it a different mood, which is clearly visible in the histogram. If you look at its darker end, you will see how it contains a big part of the image. The brighter end is very low, filled only by some of the light rays and the clouds on the sky. Another important detail we can recognise in this histogram is that there are parts of the image in the very dark end of the histogram, as opposite to the image before, this shows that a part of the image will be shown black without any appreciable detail, once again this is something acceptable in this photograph because it creates the silhouette at the bottom of the picture. However you should try to avoid having values at the lower end of the histogram if you don't want any part of the image to be completely black.
So summing up, we have seen that a Histogram allows us to see how bright or how dark our image is, without having to rely on its brightness on the LCD screen, which can be affected by other factors like ambient light. It will also show us if we have burned or dodged any part of the image, so that we can notice if we have lost details in our picture, which is very difficult to see on the LCD screen only.
I hope this was a clear article, if you have any doubts or suggestions, don't forget you can let me know in a comment. Thanks!
5 comments:
So, ideally, we'd look for a kind of plateau on the histogram to determine if we have a balanced shot?
Well, technically you can't really say a balanced shot will have a plateau-like histogram. If you have dark tones in your scene, a dark tree for example the histogram will show some values on the darker range, this doesn't mean ,however that the shot isn't properly exposed.
What you have to look for is a histogram where not all values are concentrated on one side, they don't necessarily need to be in the center. A plateau like histogram would mean that the whole image has the same tonal range, which is quite rare and boring :D. I hope this solved your doubt. Thanks for your interest!
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