Histograms

the histogram is maybe the most important aspect of digital camera exposure and post-processing and a lot of people don't get it so let's go over it real quickly I have Photoshop open here and some pictures from Peru this is the histogram up here it looks just like the histogram that you'll see in your camera every digital camera can show a histogram even your smartphone probably just dig through the options and visit SDIO slash tutorial for a tutorial that will provide that will show you how to view the histogram on your camera the histogram tells you whether your picture is overexposed or underexposed and it's useful because you can't just look at the back of your camera and know that for sure because there are so many other influences on how you see the picture including the brightness of the screen and the ambient light and just your own kind of personal preferences but the histogram don't lie it will tell you if something is blown out or washed out let's look at this first picture here you can see this picture is made up of mostly mid-tones the sky here is mostly grays and this ground here is actually pretty bright now as we look at the histogram we see a pretty well-formed histogram over here on the Left we have it's like a bar graph and the higher it up up it goes the more of that particular brightness you see in the image so on the left side here we have the shadows and because it Peaks up a little bit right here that means there are some shadows in the image and those shadows probably represent the dark parts of the motorcycle here as we go towards the upper middle tones here you'll see a big spike and that's become probably because of all the clouds and background that we have here almost all the brightness of the image is in that sort of area on the brightness and then as we get towards the highlights you can see there's nothing that's really touching the right side there's almost bright in there but there's not quite so it kind of fades off let's look at an image that has a little more of an extreme histogram this image here is taken shot into the Sun and the Sun is up here so this is Chelsea's picture by the way just credit where credit is due it's a beautiful picture the right side of the histogram here you can see it spikes up to the top and that means that there's a part of the picture that is pure white as it kind of fades away you can see there are some mid-tones here but there's no part of the picture that is completely black it's there's there's just no black point here it only goes down to gray and that's kind of a good indication that the picture might be a little washed out and that's easy to fix in either Lightroom or Photoshop in Photoshop an easy way to do that is to add a levels adjustment layer so I'll just add that layer here and then I could just bring the black point up and so now you can see I brought the black point up and that changed the histogram the histogram shifted a little bit to the left so things that were dark gray became solid black now and we'll probably see those solid blacks maybe in the deep shadows here or maybe on the back of the animal there I could go crazy just for the sake of demonstrating what a histogram does and change the black point way up here and now you'll see we still have a spike on the right but we also have a spike on the left this is the original histogram and I've just modified the black and well just the black point and a Photoshop kind of adjusted the other things let's look at another picture this picture again even if we don't look at the histogram you could probably predict that the histogram would spike over on the right side just because looking at the picture there's a lot of bright sky in here and these clouds they're like almost overexposed you can see they're not quite touching the right side if something's touching the right side that means it's completely blown out and in a JPEG file you wouldn't be able to recover it in a raw file you might be able to recover it in your raw processor like Camera Raw or Adobe Lightroom this is a well exposed picture you can see from the histogram here that there are black points and there are white points and that's what I always like to see I always like to see a little bit of white and a little bit of black in average picture it we could however make this picture washed out and this is a really common problem that we see I could drag these sliders down and push the histogram into the middle if you see a histogram that looks like that your picture is washed out and I can't tell you how many pictures we get submitted to us that are a little bit washed out I have a whole video dedicated to fixing that STP io / top tip type that in and it will take you to that video but if you see that basically you want to adjust the black and white points until it looks a little bit better in Lightroom you can do that by using the develop module for a picture let's go back to this one and then dragging the black point down to make the black point darker and the white point up to make the white point brighter until you see a good histogram now that overdid it on that picture because the original image wasn't actually washed out let's look at another picture this image you can see has a lot of extremes in it the histogram is shaped more like a you than a hill in the middle if then the histogram is shaped like a hill the image might look a little bit washed out if it's shaped like a u it's going to be very high contrast this is a high contrast image composed mostly of deep shadows here on this wall and bright bright skies whether or not that's okay there's not a rule for that it depends on the style that you're going for the contrast works for this image so I might not want to change it though I might want to add a black point now this image again look at the histogram it's shaped more like a u instead of a hump the u means it's a high contrast image for better or worse if that's consistent with the style then that's great now let's look at this image over in Lightroom just because images are a little bit easier to do this type of editing in Lightroom and if we wanted to we could brighten up these mid-tones because you can see like these mid-tones probably describe her but she's the focus of the picture so it might be better to make her a little bit brighter and then now we've overexposed the sky because I slowed the whole exposure to the right I could bring the highlights down now as they bring those highlights down watch what happens to the histogram you see the not the whole histogram is shifting very much but the right side of the histogram the highlights are shifting a lot if I use the shadow slider here you can guess which part of the histogram is going to move right just the shadows here so I'll just drag the shadows up and you'll see those shadows move but the highlights really didn't change now there are two different types of histograms that you'll encounter the luminance histogram looks like this it's just basically white and it describes the brightness of the image the luminance histogram would be identical for both black and white and color images you can also choose on a lot of cameras to see the individual colors separated like this here you can see the red blue and green channels all colors are composed all cause of light are composed with red blue and green primary colors you can see that there's a lot of blue in the image just because the Blues are a little bit brighter than the greens and the red and that's because well the sky is blue now that's useful information it can often tell you that the white balance is a little bit wrong like if you were to take a picture of a white wall and you saw that the Blues were brighter than the Reds that would indicate that the color balance was a little bit off and needed to be shifted more to the warm warm sides that those Reds would raise up some you don't really have to worry about color histograms I don't find them all that useful I really just prefer to use the luminosity histogram anyway I hope that has helped you understand how to use the histogram if you see images that have histograms that look like this this means your picture is just flat-out underexposed you can see it has shadows and mid-tones but no proper highlights if you see a histogram that looks like that you should add exposure compensation to your camera visit sdp dot io / tutorial to find a tutorial for your specific camera that will show you how to use the exposure compensation properly the reason it's particularly vital to make sure that the right side of the histogram is filled up is that this is the sweetest part of your picture this right here that is the cleanest part of the image data in this part of the histogram has about eight times less noise than data in this part of the histogram that's why your shadows always look so noisy so it's easy to lower the exposure impost but if you under expose the picture and you need to brighten it that means your image is going to have two maybe four times more image than necessary just watch that histogram do what they call shooting to the right which is making sure when you take the picture there's something in this right side especially if you post process you can always bring it back down you'll just end up with a cleaner image if you want more tips about photography check out my book stunning digital photography you can pick it up on Amazon or at stp io / door I also have books on using Lightroom and Photoshop post-processing is a great way to improve your photography to H come with tons of videos and other benefits like Facebook groups where you can get peers who are also learning photography to help you out s dpi OSS or Amazon or of course subscribe it's free and we'll give you lots more photography videos bye

Channel: Tony & Chelsea Northrup

Views: 341,015

Keywords: training, how-to, how, to, photography, tutorial, canon, nikon, dslr, stunning, digital, photo, picture, pictures

Id: ZmAw_Zd7zP4

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 10 2017