The perfect Histogram ?

[monkeyleader]

So now I've moved into fully manual mode I need to fully understand and know how to read the histogram. Too much to the left (too dark) Too much to the right (too bright) So it looks like to achieve the perfect exposure you want something in the middle, however I look at some of my photos though and to the eye they look fine but the histogram looks way off.

So my question - is there a perfect histogram we should be looking to achieve or does it really depend on the situation?

ta,

Nige

[toadoftoadhall]

depends on the subject you are photographing.

you may want the highlights blown, so expose to the right.

you may want to loose shadow detail, so expose to the left.


you are a photographer, light is your tool.

toad

[Chunder]

I've read an article somewhere that suggests that for a digital camera you want to move the histogram towards the right (brighter exposure) as much as possible, without blowing any of the highlights.

The digital sensors are several orders of magnitude more sensitive to light than to dark - so if you underexpose (compared to the centrepoint) an image, you'll lose details in the dark areas. If you overexpose, then more detail is captured - you'll just need to adjust the brightness/contrast using software.

[sbw]

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tu...stograms.shtml

[Liquid101]

Originally Posted by monkeyleader

So my question - is there a perfect histogram we should be looking to achieve or does it really depend on the situation?

The perfect histogram is one which shows that you are losing no detail in either shadow or highlight. In simple terms, It should be perfectly flat just before 0 and perfectly flat just before 255.. with all of your pixels lying between the two. If you have pixels right on the edge then the likelyhood is you're losing detail which can not be retrieved.

Obviously if you have a very high key shot with lots of highlight detail, like a snowscape, most of your pixels are going to be positioned to the right of centre on the histogram. If you have a spike on the edge, then adjust exposure to bring the detail back onto the histogram. The same applys to shadows. In an ideal digital photograph you will have no black or white pixels at all, this will give you plenty to work with afterwards - In reality, this is quite hard to achieve on a perfect sunny day!


I can understand why some people might suggest having a lightly overexposed image, as digital camera sensors are much better at recording mid tones than shadows, but beware of losing highlight detail.

HTH