Cheat sheet: How to read a

histogram
By Matt Golowczynski 6 hours ago

Scroll down for your cheat sheet

Histograms are available on the vast majority of cameras and they

are a simple way of assessing two important things. If you never use
them, or you're not quite sure what they're supposed to show, read
on to get up to speed – and scroll down to the bottom for your
handy cheat sheet.

How to understand a camera's histogram

A camera's histogram is a graphical representation of the tonal

range in your image. In other words, it shows you how much of your
scene will record as a shadow, how much as a highlight and how
much in between.

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 The left-hand side corresponds with shadow detail and the right-
hand side with highlights, and you can view this either as you
compose your image or afterwards when playing back your image
(or both). Usually this histogram will come up when you press your
camera's 'Disp', 'Info' or directional menu-pad buttons, but this may
not be the case on your particular model, so check your manual if
you're unsure of how to access this.

Examining this will give you a better idea of two things. The first is
the overall exposure. As you adjust your camera's aperture, shutter
speed and ISO, you should see the information within this graph
move. As you increase the exposure – such as by using a longer
shutter speed or a wider aperture – you should see this move
towards the right, away from the left-hand side of the scale. This is
because more of the scene will record as a midtone and highlight,
and less as a shadow. Likewise, decreasing the exposure will move
this tonal spread away from the highlights and down towards the
shadows.

Read more: Cheat sheet – How to understand f stops

With an average scene, one that naturally contains a varied mixture

of highlights, shadows and midtones, you'll be aiming to keep this
spread so that it fits somewhere in the middle of the scale, and this
should give you a good exposure. Not every scene is the same,
however, which is where the second important thing histograms tell
you comes in: how much detail is being recorded and how much is
lost.

Once the graph starts to show lots of tonal information bunched up

to either side, to the point where it's falling off the edge and
reaching the top of scale, details in this region are not being

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 properly recorded. Too much of this on the left-hand side means
that it's shadow detail you're losing, and too much on the right will
indicate highlights are blowing their details. So, the key is to ensure
your chosen exposure settings don't allow this to happen.

Read more: 32 tips and tricks to make a basic camera more

powerful

It's important to remember that different scenes will have different

histograms, and there's nothing wrong with there being more details
on one side than the other. Indeed, if you always try to adjust your
exposure to keep everything as much in the centre as possible,
you'll find that some scenes just don't look right.

For example, if you're out shooting a scene in the snow, you'll

probably want more information to be on the right-hand-side of the
scale, as your scene will be filled with more highlight detail than
usual. If you try to squeeze all of this down to the middle of the
scale for balance, you'll find that those whites are being recorded
more as greys.

Read more: Cheat sheet – Pro portrait light setups

Histograms are particularly useful as they are not affected by the

brightness of your camera's LCD screen or electronic viewfinder (if
your camera has one). Sometimes, raising the brightness of one of
these might be necessary in order to maintain a clear view, perhaps
when photographing outdoors when it's sunny, but this can make it
more difficult to see whether you are giving the scene the right
exposure.

What they are affected by, however, are other capture settings you
may have chosen, such as contrast or dynamic range optimisation

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 settings. If you set a high-contrast capture setting, you'll find that
there's more information being recorded in both the shadows and
highlights at the expense of mid-tone detail, than if you were to use
a more standard contrast setting. Conversely, dynamic range
optimisation settings may bring highlight and shadow details more
towards the middle of the graph to prevent these from being lost.

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