Histograms

Did you know that looking at the back of your camera to view your images tells you almost nothing about whether or not your exposure was correct.

The only real way is to view the histogram of the image.

So what’s a histogram?

It’s a graphical representation of the tonal values of your image. What it shows is the amount of tones of different brightness ranging from black to white and everything in between.

A histogram will quickly show you if you’re underexposing or overexposing your image. It can indicate whether or not you’re losing detail (called clipping).

Histograms aren’t just for adjusting the exposure. The image can also display information for the three primary colours of red, green and blue (RGB histogram).

Using the histogram to evaluate colour can be crucial in producing an image with the correct exposure for a particular object or scene.

At last night’s excellent presentation by Andrew McLachian called Jungle Jewels at the Oakville Camera Club he showed us how he used the red channel in his camera’s histogram to ensure that the red coloured Costa Rica frog he was shooting came out as bright red in the image. Without the adjustment thanks to the histogram the red colour would have been diminished losing the wonderful effect Andrew got in the picture.

So go to YouTube and watch some videos on using your histogram and never (ok almost never) miss an exposure again even in difficult lighting situations.