Histo What

Have you seen or heard of the histogram on your camera? Do you know what it is and when or how to use it? Is this an easy thing to learn and remember? Read on in this week's edition to find out the what, when, and why of using this very valuable tool on your camera.

When you take a picture using the LCD screen on your camera you see a LCD depiction of what that photo looks like. How often though do you look at it and say to yourself that photo looks amazing only to go home load it onto your computer and say what a bunch of crap. This photo is way too dark or light. This is when knowing how to read a histogram becomes so important.

Let's start with how to show the histogram on your LCD screen. On a canon camera when you choose view photo you can then press the info button on the back left hand side of the camera body. Nikon users will have to look it up in your manual but it should be similar. As you click through you see a variety of views from shutter count to RGB and then there is histogram view.

Now that you can see your histogram let's talk about what it is and how to read it. The histogram shows the tonal range of a photo. That is the dark, the light, and the neutral. On the left hand side is the dark or black, on the right hand side is the light or white, and the middle ground is the neutrals and grays. When you take your photo what you want to see is a nice balance over all three sections right? Wrong. This is where most articles confuse you and I will try to keep it simple.


Look at what you are shooting before you press the shutter. Consider what tonal ranges are in your photo. If you are shooting on a very bright day and a lot of the subject is white you will see a stacking like a spike on the right side of your histogram. If your subject is a full third black or very dark then the histogram will stack to the left. It's only when everything is kind of equal across the range you see a nice balance across the histogram.

You can see in these three examples exactly what I'm talking about. The top photo the range is fairly balanced with a small spike in the middle and a large spike on the right. The spike on the right is the "blown out" sky. Blown out refers to the loss of digital information. The sensor is so overwhelmed there is no information to read on that far side.




This photo represents the tonal mid-range. There are a few spikes and those would be the sparkle off the dress and the clouds.






Finally A photo with the histogram pressed heavily to the left. With all this black there is no information to read.





As you can see from the examples reading a histogram is not really that difficult. Look at your shot watching for what you expect the histogram to read like, really bright, really black, or neutral and then expose for that using aperture, shutter speed or ISO

Is RAW Right For You

You have your SLR Camera. You understand some of your manual settings. Now the question is what is RAW, why shoot in RAW why not just shoot in jpeg. RAW is a professional photo format right. Absolutely not. Read this week's blog to understand why shooting RAW will help you improve your photography and smooth out your editing problems.

Most SLR cameras and some higher end point and shoots allow you to shoot in jpeg format or RAW, and the biggest difference between the two formats is the amount of information that is stored. On my Canon I have the ability to shoot both at the same time which is the preference I use. The true beauty of shooting in RAW is you can control so much more of your post production work. Whenever you make adjustments to a photo in jpeg and save the file you lose just a little more information at a time, something to do with pixels being compressed. Let's face it there is nothing more frustrating than taking a photo and when you download it from the memory card you realize the white balance was a little off, or your exposure was over/under by a half stop, or any other little detail that might make the shot mediocre at best. After all you took your time, composed the shot, checked your white balance and your exposure, it should have been perfect but it's just off by a bit. In steps post production, you can see 7 Steps to Lightroom Magic for some tips. Post production is your friend and nothing makes it easier than working with a RAW file, the amount of detail that is captured and can be brought out of a photo is amazing.

This photo was taken at Harrison Lake, a place I love to wander around, and was all but lost due to the underexposure of the shot. It was a very bright back light that caused this couple, enjoying the rainy day, to become significantly underexpose. Now I realized this as soon as the shot was taken but before I could correct the problem they moved on. This is not a problem for me as I do shoot RAW and I knew that although the camera exposure sensor was tricked I could fix the photo in Lightroom and save this very candid moment. That's what the value of RAW is, saving a photo that needs just a bit of help.

There are other values to shooting RAW that I have not gotten into this week. Perhaps another time I will revisit this subject. If there is a question about the RAW vs. Jpeg please leave a comment or drop me a line.