This means that some of the highlights have been clipped: there is no longer any data that can be recovered, and no matter what I do in Photoshop or Lightroom there are some portions of my image that show up as pure white and can’t be edited. The problem with this image, as you can see in the above histogram, is that the graph literally goes off the chart on the right-hand side. (This is a technique called expose to the right, which is a fantastic way to get a little more out of your photography if you are willing to put in a bit of time editing pictures on your computer.) The large curve on the right-hand side tells me that most of the color information is concentrated on the lighter side, which is actually a good thing because more data is actually collected in the highlight portions of the image which can then be brought down later in a program like Lightroom. I could tell right away that this picture of some college students playing Quidditch was a little overexposed, but looking at the histogram data right on my camera gave me additional information that helped me adjust my shooting on the spot.
Most cameras allow you to overlay the histogram on top of a given photo during playback, or as you shoot the photo when using Live View. It’s also good information to have out in the field, such as in the following example: This is good information to have when using post-processing software because it shows you not only where the color data exists for a given picture, but also where any data has been clipped: that is, it does not exist and, therefore, cannot be edited. A histogram that is skewed to the right would indicate a picture that is a bit overexposed because most of the color data is on the lighter side, while a histogram with the curve on the left shows a picture that is underexposed.
very black) and the lightest of lights (i.e. Most photos will have some darker pixels and some brighter pixels, but in general all the information captured by a camera’s image sensor should fall somewhere between the darkest of darks (i.e. An example of a hypothetical histogram for a properly exposed photo.Ī histogram similar to this example would mean that most of the color data is concentrated in the middle: the greatest quantity of pixels is neither too dark nor too light.
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