Hello! It is Danielle again and welcome to the Pangolin Chobe Hotel in Kasane.
I am working on some Lightroom edits and I am sitting in one of our hotel rooms.
You can see there's ample space for your computer, your camera and charging ports...
everything happening here in the room, so a great space for photographers to do their thing.
Today, we'll be talking about the histogram. What it is and how you interpret it.
Before I continue...please remember to subscribe to our channel,
and hit the bell icon at the bottom, to get notifications about our next video.
So, as you can see on my screen here, I have the image that I took yesterday on the river.
You can then see the histogram on the right hand side in the develop panel.
A histogram is basically a graphical display of tonal values of an image.
It shows you how many pixels are at which area of the image...meaning
on the left-hand side of the histogram, you see it says blacks - over there at the bottom.
Then it says shadows. Exposure in the middle. Highlights and then whites.
This represents all the lights and darks that are present in the image.
A darker image would have a graph sitting more on the left-hand side, and a lighter
image would have a graph sitting more on the right-hand side.
The mid-tones are represented in the middle.
What you can see here is an RGB histogram, which means
that it represents your primary colours...your red, your green and your blue.
Wherever those colours overlap, you have your yellow, your cyan and your magenta.
Wherever the graph is grey - on the right-hand side - it means all colours
are represented. So, where two of the three primary colours overlap,
you will have magenta, cyan or yellow...and then the rest are your
primary colours of red, green and blue. So it looks complicated in the beginning,
but it just shows you how many pixels they are in the lighter areas, and how
many pixels are represented in the darker areas.
On this histogram, as you can see with the Fish Eagle on the side of the river - on the river bank -
The Fish Eagle has a few dark spots in his feathers, so some of his
body is dark, and then his head and his neck is light and white.
So those lights represented in the Fish Eagle's head, would be on the right hand side of the graph,
and the darker areas would be on the left, near the shadows.
A very small number of pixels that are
represented on the dark side, because most of the image is very light.
Yesterday, when I took this shot, I saw that the Fish Eagle's head was giving me 'blinkies'
...you can refer to the 'blinkies' video about what they are in our playlists.
But basically it showed that the neck and the head of the fish eagle was
flashing black and white on my screen, and that you don't really want, because
that means that you're losing detail...as I say on my video. So you can see that
the 'blinkies' are basically a representation of the histogram.
It's a shortcut. If you see it on the back of your LCD screen on your camera blinking
you know that on the histogram you're gonna have a lot of tones on the
right-hand side of your histogram...AND what we call clipping happens.
So, as you can see on this histogram, there's a blue arrow lighting up on the right,
so that alerts you that your highlights are clipping, which means your highlights are
touching the right-hand side of the histogram. This is not something you want.
You want the graph to be away from the sides (mostly)...because as soon
as it touches either left side, or right side, and it gives you that little
triangle alert that lights up. It means that you're losing detail...either on the
right-hand side on the highlights, or on the left-hand side you're losing detail
on the black areas. You do want to try and not do that when you shoot.
It is slightly recoverable - to a certain degree - but on the way right,
if it clips, it means you have lost detail in the
highest highlights, or the brightest highlights, if I can say it that way.
So, you can take the histogram and try and drag it down slightly to the left...
and you will see that the arrow disappears. If I drag it to the right, it lights up again.
If I drag it to the left, it goes dark. So you can do that, to a certain extent.
If your lights are blown out - your highlights are blown out too much -
then you will see it never pulls away from the right-hand side.
What you should have done in camera, as I explained on my previous video, and you
can go and check it out, is you should under-expose then slightly.
So, as soon as you see 'blinkies' on the camera screen (on the LCD screen), you know that it's over
exposing, meaning you know it's clipping on your histogram, and you know that
those highlights won't contain any details...and you do want details in his
feathers, for example, and on his neck. So what you do in camera, is you would
under-expose, making your picture slightly darker. So what I can do to show you
is this was the other image that I took, and I under-exposed slightly yesterday.
So, if you look at the histogram, you will see that nothing touches on the left,
so the detail and the dark spots are maintained/retained, and the details in the
highlights are also retained...and that is a much better image, because you cannot
recover blown-out highlights. You can still recover shadows to a certain extent,
depending on how much noise pops up in your image, but you can check that
out on another tutorial. That's the histogram explained.
If you want to move around any area, you can either do it in Lightroom - in the basic
panel - so you can move your exposure around, or as you see there, it shows you
those are the shadows you click, you drag and you lighten-up the shadows.
So, you can either use your sliders in your panels, or you can use your histogram and
actually grab and drag your histogram along..and see what effect that has on
the highlights and the shadows of your image. Just remember, don't clip on the right,
don't clip on the left...and then you should be okay with
retaining details in all the shadows and the highlights.
I hope that explains it. Check out our other videos that explain other concepts in Lightroom.
Thanks for watching.
If you have any comments, please leave them in the comment section below,
and we will answer any questions that you have.
Until next time. Bye bye!