The Digital Camera Histogram
Written on Oct 8th, 2007
One of the main advantages of digital photography over film photography, at least in my mind, is the ability to view the histogram shortly after taking the shot. While viewing the image on the LCD is obviously an advantage as well, it’s difficult to tell if the shot actually turned out based on a small image on a 2-3″ LCD. An example histogram from Luminous Landscape A histogram shows you how many pixels in the image (shown on the vertical axis) are at each intensity level (0-255 typically, shown on the horizontal axis). If the histogram is bunched to the left, that typically means the image contains mostly low intensity values, and is probably underexposed. If the histogram contains a tail that runs off the right-hand side, that typically means there are pixels in the image that are overexposed. You can typically recover information from the shadows, but it is […]
