How to tell with a quick look at a histogram display whether an image is correctly exposed and contrasting.
Hello and welcome to this tutorial.
I will be outlining some of the information you can read straight off a histogram with very little understanding of what it is showing. It is a very underused tool, mainly because most people using digital cameras do not underand what to look for and so they ignore it.
Most digital cameras come with a histogram display, but what exactly is a histogram?
Simply put – it is a representation of the colours within your image. On the left, black, on the right, white; with every colour in between. The vertical height of any column shows how many pixels of that exact colour there are in your image at each brightness setting.
Now that you know what you are looking at, I’ll show examples of some common things you can see.
Exposure
Ok – It can be hard to tell on your small LCD display whether an image is exposed correctly. Just take a look at the histogram and you will see quickly.
