Histograms for Beginners - And how it can improve your photography

if you've ever wondered what this strange looking graph is on the back of your camera this is a histogram and the histogram can actually be very important so in this video i'm going to show you what a histogram is what it's showing us and most importantly how we can use it to take better photos so i hope you'll stick around hi paul here from photogenius welcome to my channel where i do photography tutorials like this one i share tips and tricks and occasionally i do gear reviews as well so if you're new here please consider subscribing this video is all about histograms for beginners and i've got five goals i want to achieve in this video goal number one is to show you how to view the histogram explain to you what it is how we can use it to improve our photography show you how to view the live histogram and finally going to talk about a technique called exposing to the right okay no time to waste first thing i want to do is show you how to view the histogram on your digital camera viewing the histogram is usually pretty straightforward if you've got a fujifilm camera you press playback and then the display button most of the entry-level canon cameras also have a display button so same again press playback display you may have to press it a couple of times up comes the histogram if your canon camera doesn't have a display button it's going to have an info button so this is a canon 80d press playback info once twice there's the histogram nikon is where it gets interesting because with most nikon entry level cameras you cannot view the histogram until you set this up so it's not a factory setting so for you nikon users i'm going to show you how to set this up it won't take a moment so here we have a nikon camera we can view our images but not our histogram so let's fix this by pressing the menu from the menu options let's go to the playback menu then select playback display options and from the options available let's skip rgb histogram and go to overview select this one press ok and now all we need to do is press playback and using the multi-selected tool you can press up or down to view the overview page now the overview page shows you not just the camera settings but also the histogram and you're done so now we know how to view the histogram let's take a look at what it is and what it's showing us a histogram is basically a chart it's a graphical representation of the tonal range or the range of tones that your camera has captured and recorded when you took a picture so let's take a look at a histogram and break it down into sections we're going to start by moving over to the far left of the histogram this is where the blacks are so this is the very darkest part of your image if we move over to the right this is where your shadow detail will be found in the middle not surprisingly are the mid-tones over to the right of the mid-tones are the highlights these are the brighter parts of your image and over to the right is white these are where the whites are so this is the complete extreme of the black side of the histogram now if you're a lightroom user you can open up an image in lightroom hover over the histogram and you can see it clearly broken down into sections so let's take a look at an image this image taken in guildford in the uk and this is a a pretty reasonable exposure if we bring the histogram up this will show us the tones that we've captured now if we look at the histogram when we start by looking over to the left we see quite a lot of peaking going on so there's a lot of data over there which means we've got a lot of shadow detail going on and this is going to be the dark areas here in the bushes and the trees this dark tree over here and that's all the shadow detail in terms of the in terms of mid-tones there's there's a big peak in over here which is yellow and that's going to be the grey areas in the sky and probably the castle itself over to the right we've got a massive peak here which is the sky this is the brighter part of the image so we've got lots of sky detail going on and lucky for us there's no peeking over to the right otherwise the image will be overexposed now if we move on to the next picture this is clearly an underexposed image and of course the histogram now reflects that you will see that all the data all the peaks have now moved over or shifted to the left so we've got a lot of peaking going on on the left and it is actually touching the edge of the histogram so that means that parts of our image are absolute black which generally is not ideal that's this area along here there is some midtones going on this is going to be representing the sky and there's no peeking or anything over to the right so there's no real highlight detail in this image now if we move on to the next one again clearly overexposed everything will shift over to the right because now we've captured more brighter tones so straight away over to the right here we see a massive peak again it's touching the right of the histogram that means that some of the parts of this image are so overexposed they literally are white and that of course is the sky the mid tones have dropped considerably but that's generally this area here and the shadow detail again there is some shadow detail there but it's dropped quite a lot so clearly with our own eyes we can see when an image is over or underexposed but the histogram is good because it shows us to what extent that has occurred we generally don't want any peeking over to the right or over to the far left so what does a perfect histogram look like well in a moment i'm going to show you before that i want to tell you about skillshare who have kindly sponsored this video if like myself you love creating take a moment to check out what skillshare has to offer because there has never been a better time to learn new skills and skillshare is an online learning community for creatives with thousands of inspiring classes covering topics that include illustration design music video and of course photography so this week i've been watching some great tutorials and picked up some really cool tips on cinematography and filmmaking from zach mulligan and you can too because for a limited time you can use the link in the description below this video to get a free trial of skillshare premium membership and take your creativity to the next level so many thanks to skillshare for sponsoring this video and supporting my channel so what is the perfect histogram well some say the perfect histogram should look a bit like a mountain or a hill so it should have lots of peaking in the middle and then the graph should tail off down to the edges now i went through my images earlier today this image i selected i took this a few weeks ago here in brisbane and if i bring up the histogram you'll see that it almost fits the description of the perfect histogram it looks a bit like a mountain or hill there's lots of peaking in the middle which is the mid-tones i've got some shadow detail i've got some highlight detail now there is a bit of a peak over here to the far right which means that technically i have slightly overexposed the image and if we bring the image back this will be the sun rays coming through the top of the frame here so nothing to really be too worried about so that is pretty much the perfect histogram so what if you take an image and your histogram looks nothing like this does it mean you stuffed up well not necessarily let's take a look at another image and i'll explain why so here's our next histogram and as you can clearly see this histogram does not fit the description of the perfect histogram because all the peak in all the data is over to the left and that means we've captured lots of shadow or dark detail in the image there's a little bit i guess of mid-tones but generally no highlights well if we now take a look at the image we see why this is a shot at night time i took this a couple of years ago in paris it was in the evening and of course there's not going to be any highlights because the sun is not up there's nothing that is particularly bright okay there's some street lights the lights on the eiffel tower are going to be bright but generally speaking this image is mostly made up of darker tones so let's bring the histogram back up the great thing about this histogram is it shows us that i've successfully captured all the shadow detail all the dark tones but i'm not clipping i'm not hitting the left hand side of the graph so that means i've got nothing that is absolutely black and i've got nothing that is absolutely white so although the histogram is not in the middle it shifted over to the left that's okay because again the histogram represents the tones that you've captured let's take a look at another image now looking at this histogram this is the complete opposite of the one we looked at previously where most of the data was over to the left clearly with this histogram the data is over to the right there's a bit of shadow detail here here we have some mid-tones but here is where most of the data is so this is an image which technically is overexposed let's take a look at the image this image i shot a few days ago on the gold coast beautiful day close to sundown so i'm actually shooting towards the sun the sun is about to go down and i actually quite like it the overexposed area of course is here where the sun is reflecting off the sea here's where our shadow detail is and again it's open to um individual interpretation if you like some people would not like this image but i actually quite like it so again the histogram is a representation of the tones you've captured here's the guy with the surfboard here's um let's go back this is the the midtones here is probably going to be the mountains in the in the background here maybe these rocks but clearly the highlights and this massive peak here is going to be this overexposed area again it's open to individual interpretation i quite like the image so although although this doesn't fit the bill of the perfect histogram again with me that's okay now when it comes to histograms there is no right or wrong it's entirely up to you how you interpret your image because photography is an art form so if you're purposely choosing to underexpose your image your histogram will reflect that and most of the data will be over to the left hand side of the graph if you're purposely overexposing your image for effect maybe and again that's perfectly fine it's your choice then of course when you look at the histogram most of the data is going to be over to the right generally speaking though where possible we do want to avoid clipping the shadows or the highlights so ideally we don't want any peeking over to the far right or the far left you may have heard a term called blown out sometimes people say oh you've blown out the highlights your sky is blown out that means that you have pushed the exposure to the extent where the sky the bright parts of your image are so overexposed that you can't recover the detail even if you're editing maybe a raw image so you need to watch out for that one but again no rules the histogram is a visual representation of the tonal range of your image based on what you've chosen and how you've chosen to capture your image so exposing to the right is a popular technique often used by photographers as a way of giving you a better tonal range and less digital noise in your images and it simply means that you look at your histogram prior to taking the picture and then what you do is you push it a bit more to the right where the highlights are then you take your image put it into software like lightroom for example and pull everything back again this is a very popular technique and it's pretty straightforward and easy to do so earlier on today i took an image with a canon 80d if you look at the histogram there's a lot of peeking over to the left so there's a lot of underexposed areas in this image there's picture number one now for picture number two i wanted to try out the exposing to the right technique so all i've done is i've adjusted the exposure compensation on the camera and watch as the histogram starts to shift over to the right now there's a lot of peak in there i don't want this to peek i don't want to clip my highlight so i'm just going to bring this back a little bit and here's picture number two okay so i've now opened up the image in lightroom and remember this image was taken using the technique exposing to the right which means it's slightly overexposed because we're pushing the highlights and if we look at the histogram we can see that there's a lot of detail over to the right where the highlights are equally there is a lot of shadow detail there's not a lot of midtones going on so we're going to fix this so first thing we're going to do is just bring the exposure down a touch then i'm going to go to the highlights which will affect the highlights i'm going to bring the highlights down and you'll see how this starts to recover the detail in the sky i'm then going to go to the shadow slider and of course i don't want to reduce the shadows and make it even darker i want to increase the shadows to bring the detail out in the shadows okay it looks pretty cool look at look how it's changed the look of the histogram has completely changed it going to just increase the exposure touch now that looks really cool now contrast just going to increase the contrast a touch okay and for now i'm going to leave it at that i mean this is not a finished edit by any means but if we look at the before and the after this shows you how easy it is to edit an image in lightroom especially when you're using the exposing to the right technique and of course the histogram now popular with landscape photographers is the live histogram and this means that you can see your histogram actually whilst you're composing and putting your image together and this is great because you can then see how your image is going to come out before you actually press the shutter button this is a feature found in all of the mirrorless cameras but also you can use this in some dslr cameras as long as you're shooting in the live view mode and to show you this working i'm using the live view function on my nikon camera and as i wave it around and move it from bright sky to dark shadows you can clearly see the histogram adjusting in real time based on the tones that it sees at that moment so i hope you've enjoyed this video and you now know a bit more about histograms and how you can use them to better your photography i'd like to say a big thank you to skillshare for sponsoring this video and for supporting my channel if you've enjoyed the video please give us a thumbs up it really helps consider subscribing to the channel if you're not already subscribed new videos every single week down below you can leave comments suggestions and questions hope to see you again sometime soon see you bye you

Channel: Photo Genius

Views: 56,904

Keywords: histograms explained, histograms, histogram photography, photography, photography tips for beginners, what is a histogram, camera tips, camera histogram explained, the perfect exposure photography, camera histogram for dummies, how to use a histogram, nikon histogram tutorial, nikon histogram display, Canon histogram, how to se the histogram on a nikon camera, canon 80d, photography tutorial

Id: QERBFx7MR_Q

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020