Histograms, in my opinion, are the best thing about digital cameras. Yeah, seeing your image on the LCD screen after it has been taken is great, but it can be tough to see whether you've exposed your image properly on such a small screen. Historgams help greatly in that regard. What a histogram shows, then, is the range of tonalities (shadows, through midtones, to highlights) in your image.

Let's get right to it. This is a photo of the LCD screen on my camera showing the photo I took as well as the histogram for this photo and other information about the image:



Looking at the histogram, you can see that there are tonalities ranging from shadows (left side of the histogram) to the highlights (right side of the histogram), with the bulk of the tonalites nestled in the midtone range. What you might also notice is that none of the tonalities push up the edge of the histogram. For most of the photos you take, this is what you want to have happen.

Make sense so far? less

Histograms, in my opinion, are the best thing about digital cameras. Yeah, seeing your image on the LCD screen after it has been taken is great, but it can be tough to see whether you've exposed your image properly on such a small screen. Historgams help greatly in that regard. What a histogram shows, then, is the range of tonalities (shadows, through midtones, to highlights) in your image.

Let's get right to it. This is a photo of the LCD screen on my camera showing the photo I took as well as the histogram for this photo and other information about the image:



Looking at the histogram, you can see that there are tonalities ranging from shadows (left side of the histogram) to the highlights (right side of the histogram), with the bulk of the tonalites nestled in the midtone range. What you might also notice is that none of the tonalities push up the edge of the histogram. For most of the photos you take, this is what you want to have happen.

Make sense so far? less

Histograms, in my opinion, are the best thing about digital cameras. Yeah, seeing your image on the LCD screen after it has been taken is great, but it can be tough to see whether you've exposed your image properly on such a small screen. Historgams help greatly in that regard. What a histogram shows, then, is the range of tonalities (shadows, through midtones, to highlights) in your image.

Let's get right to it. This is a photo of the LCD screen on my camera showing the photo I took as well as the histogram for this photo and other information about the image:



Looking at the histogram, you can see that there are tonalities ranging from shadows (left side of the histogram) to the highlights (right side of the histogram), with the bulk of the tonalites nestled in the midtone range. What you might also notice is that none of the tonalities push up the edge of the histogram. For most of the photos you take, this is what you want to have happen.

Make sense so far? less

I've got three external hard drives, but I had stopped manually updating them because I got software that automatically backs the computer up every night. Unfortunately, I discovered that it actually makes restore points every night, and you can't actually access the individual files unless you are on the computer - a decided difficulty considering the computer won't work. less

I've got three external hard drives, but I had stopped manually updating them because I got software that automatically backs the computer up every night. Unfortunately, I discovered that it actually makes restore points every night, and you can't actually access the individual files unless you are on the computer - a decided difficulty considering the computer won't work. less

OK, so here is a histogram from my wife's point-and-shoot camera:



The software in this camera displays the histogram slightly differently, but the idea remains the same. However, this histogram shows that some of the tonalities bled over into the overly shadow (shown as being within the blue rectangle on this camera) and overly highlight (red rectangle) areas. Admittedly, I don't know what these rectangles infer on this camera, but given the rest of the histogram, it appears it isn't an issue because none of the tonalities go over the edge (I'll show you examples of this in a few minutes).

There are a range of cameras using a range of different software, so I wanteed to make sure you understand that the way each camera displays the histogram will differ, but the information in the histogram is interpreted the same.

Still following me? less