How to Process Using the HISTOGRAM ONLY (Lightroom Tutorial)

[Music] this is Anthony Morgan tee I am mr. photographer dot-com today I'm going to show you a different processing workflow that's becoming more and more popular with many photographers many photographers are processing their image with the histogram mainly meaning they're not using any of the sliders in the tone section of the basic tab they're doing all their adjusting on the histogram directly now there's kind of a method to their madness and I'm going to do my best to try to explain it because this isn't a method that I use nor do I really care for it too much but at times it does seem to work very well and give great results so I wanted to pass this along to you now if you're not super familiar with the histogram and how it works I do have several videos on the histogram where I talk about it in detail and what it means and what it does and how you could use it to adjust images if you haven't seen those videos I'll have it linked in the description below and I'll have one linked up here on the top right hand side now as far as this method the theory is and it kind of borrows I think this is my opinion a little bit from the zone system that any Ansel Adams and Fred Archer developed the zone system of course is for black and white photography and in the zone system we have the different zones and it is thought that image is most pleasing if you have representation of all those zones in an image so you have all those different Gray's in an image and then it's more visually pleasing the theory here is similar as far as tone is concerned it's pretty much the same idea you want the histogram spread out all the way left to right so you have all the tones represented but to bring it a little bit further you also have the colors and if you look at the histogram you can see that there's red green and blue channels represented and there's also the RGB channel there as well so you have actually kind of four histograms in one there but the idea is that you'd like those red green and blue to be spread out too so you have red all the way from left to right green all the way from left to right as far as these actual channels on the histogram and blue all the way from left to right visually speaking when you're looking at the histogram when all is said and done if you achieve that then the image is supposed to be the most visually pleasing now the technique is some varying technique but the main way I've seen most people do it is to start off with they go and they temporarily put saturation all the way up to a hundred and when you do that you'll see the histogram does change considerably I'm not exactly sure why they do that but it I guess it helps them better adjust it so I'll teach you it that way try it both ways with a saturation at a hundred to begin with or saturation at zero to begin with now what you do is you usually start working from the middle out and you don't even look at the image don't even bother looking at the image just look at the histogram and to begin with you want to try to balance the histogram get more of representation in the middle so in this case most of the histogram is off to the left so I'm gonna just push it this way now we have it more represented in the middle it's not perfect you're not going to drag it all the way like that or anything just get it more represented towards the middle then you start working out from the middle so we go down to this area which is shadows and we start pushing that to the left and you keep going until you see some of these Peaks start to go higher so as I move it to the left you can see all of a sudden they kind of start to go up in the air or go up higher then you just stop then you go to this side and you can see that red part of the histogram is going higher then you just go out further and then out further to the blacks over here bring it all the way to the edge do you see it start to peak up and even the clipping indicator might go on then what you do is you just take saturation back down to zero and there is your processed image as far as tone is concerned there's before and there's after there's before and there's after now it's been my experience that this method works best with portraiture lifestyle images environmental portraits things like that where I don't think it works as well this is my opinion again I don't mean to offend anyone is on landscape shots and specifically on shots that are predominantly a specific tone here we have really mostly white and you can see that the histogram is way off to the right so again we'll take saturation we'll put it all the way up now we want to try to balance when we start in the middle and work our way out so I'll start pulling it this way get it a little more balanced now this side as far as the shadow since concerned is okay over here on highlights you just move that a little bit that way then we go to the whites and bring that right to the edge then we could go back to those highlights and pull those back go over here whoops kind of clicked on me so we're trying our best to balance that go to the blacks go this way we'll take saturation back down to zero and there's before and there's after to me the shadows still look a little too muddy in this shot so I don't think it worked as well here I'll try on another landscape image one that's a little more balanced this is just the histograms pretty much in the middle as it is so we'll go again to saturation take that all the way up maybe we have to just bring this middle part over that way just to touch we'll go to the shadows and move that to the left and go to the highlights and move that to the right and those of you that can't tell what I'm doing I'm on the histogram and I'm dragging directly on the histogram and that's what I talked about in that video our number of videos I mentioned before where I described the hints histogram in detail so I'll go to the blacks area here and bring that to the left and go to the highlights area there and bring that to the right and then I'll reset the saturation and there's before and there's after before after so I don't care for that one either I think I probably would have done a better job with the sliders on my own but let's try another one a kind of a lifestyle shot of kits so we have the histogram it's pretty balanced maybe we'll just bring it this way a touch we'd bring this way this way oops I forgot to bring saturation all the way up let's reset it let's reset it bring saturation all the way up there we go and go this way a little bit and then blacks that way a little bit highlights that way a little bit resets saturation okay there's before and there's after before after so that one was easy I guess and I'll try one more all right now here's one I chose on purpose because it's kind of low-key she's wearing a dark sweater and you know the leaves are kind of dark behind her so the histogram by default is going to be pretty far to the left so let's try this will take saturation all the way up will go in the middle and try to even it out a little more this way then we'll go to highlights and push a little that way until we start seeing these Peaks start to jump up and then we'll go to highlights or I'm sorry whites and bring those that way I think shadows are okay we'll go to Black's bring those that way we'll reset saturation and there's before and there's after before after now take it for what it's worth maybe it's something that you like I do think it does a nice job on portraiture a lifestyle shots I don't like what it does with landscape images but let me know in the comments below is this something you've used before is there a variation than the technique that I'm not demonstrating here that you like mention it below I'd be interested to learn it myself thank you everyone who watches my videos I really do appreciate it I'll talk to you guys soon

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 8,182

Keywords: dslr, photography, photo, tips, histogram, high key, low key, highlights, shadow, recover, photography histogram explained, photography histogram tutorial, understanding the histogram, understanding the histogram on dslr, understanding the histogram in photography, understanding the histogram in lightroom, understanding photography terms, what is a histogram, how to read a histogram video, how to use a histogram to adjust your photography, you think you know Histograms, how to edit like

Id: ihQoIjb4Wtk

Length: 9min 22sec (562 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020