Help with Histograms

nikki52405 · Jan 15, 2009

I just got a new Nikon D-90 for Christmas and it is a lot diffenert than my pint & shoot. Is there a good book or website for learning about histograms? I know nothing about them and I need a lot of help. Thanks to all for suggestions.

Eldrich · Jan 15, 2009

With questions like these, some ass always posts a google search of the question, so right now, I will be that ass

histograms in photography - Google Search

but seriously. If you look along the horizontal axis, the left represents dark pixels, and the right represents very bright pixels. The vertical axis represents the number of pixels with the given amount of brightness. So a very dark overall pic would have huge peaks on the left, and a very bright one would have huge peaks on the right. And you can also look at the same thing for all 3 different colors.

hope that helps.

Big Mike · Jan 15, 2009

There is a lot of good reading on The Luminous Landscape. Here are a couple links to get you started.

Understanding Histograms
Expose Right

ANDS! · Jan 15, 2009

Eldrich said:
So a very dark overall pic would have huge peaks on the left, and a very bright one would have huge peaks on the right. And you can also look at the same thing for all 3 different colors.

hope that helps.

Not neccesarily. A picture exposed for the sun would have A LOT of "dark pixels", and a nice awesome spike of "light pixels" despite the overall photo being tonally "dark".

It's best to look at the actual histogram than the photograph, in order to "see" what is going on. And not JUST the histogram, but the individual histograms for the color channels, because all a GENERAL histogram tells you is the TONAL spread of the image (light to dark, luminosity). It tells you nothing about the individual color channels and whether you clipped them or not, so while a photograph will not have any particular highlights or clipped shadows, it can most certainly have clipped Red, Green or Blue channels.