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Well, hello everybody. Welcome into this Adobe Photoshop tutorial. My name is
Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid.com and today we're going to take a look at how to read a
Histogram. There's not really much else to say about it. It's just super duper important
and if you enjoy the video, it would be super cool if you would subscribe and hit the
little bell icon to turn those notifications on. Let's jump over into Photoshop right
now and check this thing out. Alright, so here we are in Adobe Photoshop and let's
just cut through some of the talking and start looking at examples of how the
histogram works. We're going to try to knife our way through this real quick here.
So it begins with opening the histogram palate in or panel I should say, in Photoshop
Now the histogram is not brand loyal to Photoshop. It's really all over the place.
You're going to have histograms in places like Premiere and DeVince resolve. You have
them in camera raw editor in Lightroom. They're all over the place. They're on the
back of your camera for crying out loud. They all work the same. So understanding
how to read them, or at least what you're looking at here can be really really helpful.
Now this looks like a pretty complex histogram because we have all kinds of stuff
going on here in the photo. Basically, here's how you can think about a histogram. It works
like this. You have very dark stuff over here on the left and very bright stuff on the right.
And everything in between is dark stuff, dark dark, dark kind of middle tone. Getting
brighter, brighter, brighter, solid white. That's kind of if you looked at a histogram
that's what you're looking at here. So what this histogram's telling me is really not
a lot of super dark stuff in this image. There's a lot of stuff that's kind of in
the, we're getting pretty dark range. And I can kind of tell that because of all the
mossy green stuff on the side of this hill and things like that. And then it's kind of
a lot going on in the mid tones and just slightly brighter than mid tones and it
kind of calms down a little bit and there are a couple really bright highlights which
of course, I know cus we've got this sun piercing through the sky there. So let's
take a look at how to affect the histogram. I'm going to add a curves adjustment here
and notice by the way, for curves you have a histogram behind your curve and it mimics
exactly the histogram here. It's a little bit taler, but it's the same shape. You can see
it's all the same. So if I say, you know what, I want to make the image brighter. I'm just
going to drag a point anywhere and pull straight up. And you can see as I make the image brighter
what happens? All the whole histogram shifts very harshly. Very hard, pulled a hard right turn.
Right there to the right side of the histogram I'm going to hit the little double arrow turny
thing. That's going to give me the most updated histogram possible. You can see that we've
made the image a whole lot brighter. The opposite would happen obviously if I make the image a
whole lot darker. A lot of stuff gets slid over there to the left and we just have
a really really dark photo. So it can be a quick way to tell if you're out on the field, did
I underexpose that shot? Well, if your histogram looks anything like that, or
even if it looks that, or that, it's probably a little underexposed. When you're getting
something that's more in the center, you're probably more around where you want to be.
Sure enough, look at the photo. It still looks pretty pleasing. If we shut it off,
it's bright, but it almost looks a little too bright. Like this according to the histogram
is a little bit more of a balanced exposure if you will where we have good balance,
nothing is totally blown out. If we have a huge spike on the left, it means you've
got black somewhere that's just no detail left and if you have a huge spike on the
right, it means you've got white highlights being blown out, there's no detail. And
actually, let me just show that to you. So if I drag out a big box here and I fill it with
black, deselect. You can see we've got that line. Boom. Absolute darkest stuff in the
image and there's no detail. It's completely blown out. If I drag out a big spot here
and fill it with white, you can see we get the same thing over here. Slightly thicker
line, but the same principle holds true. It shoots all the way up to the top and
sure enough, in this big patch of white, if that was the sky in a photo of ours,
we'd have absolutely no detail there. I'm going to delete that layer. And the histogram
is kind of restored to order a little bit. I'm going to delete the curves adjustment
layer as well. Let's go to this photo of San Fransisco. Now, you can see right off
the bat the photo's predominantly dark. And sure enough, our histogram kind of tells us
that. It says look, there's something here that there's a spike of brightness. Which
yeah, we can see that in the setting sun. But aside from that, it's a very dark image
and if I add something like a color lookup table and we go with the drop blues here
just to give it more of a post-apocalyptic, apocalyptic thing. Having some trouble
speaking today. I set this to something like multiply to really darken it up even more.
You can see that we're losing a tone of detail in the absolute darkest arias. That's
probably stuff like down here at the base of this building right over here. Down here
on these streets, these trees. All kinds of arias that are essentially solid super dark
grey and solid black. And the histogram lets us know, so I can say, you know what?
I like that, but I want to back this off so I preserve some of that detail. Something
maybe a little more like that. And I can see a quick before and after. And then
lastly over here we have an image that's predominantly light. I'll update my histogram
here to get my most up to date. Look at what we've got and sure enough, yeah,
there's a lot of white going on here. Snow is very bright. It's a photo probably shot in
the noonday sun. And our histogram is going to reflect exactly what you see in
the photo. So maybe you don't want it to be quite this bright. Alright, let's throw
a levels adjustment layer on here and by the way, take note. levels also gives you that
histogram. And maybe you're looking at it and saying, look this really bright spike,
right where it's super duper bright, almost solid white. I want, I want to kind of tone
that down a little bit. So I can use the output sliders for that. I can say look,
take the white point and push it back a little bit. And you can see what happens.
Essentially the histogram from, you know, this point all the way to the very brightest
is being cleared out. So those solid whites are being completely flattened. It almost
makes the snow look grey, right? You can see how the snow is kind of nice crisp whitness
and then we flatten it and say nope, you're not allowed to go past level 232. You're
going to get this flattened tone. Now this actually gives me opportunity to explain
something here. They histogram runs from zero. The far left is zero, and zero is
total black. And 255 is total white. And sure enough, this is why levels has these
numbers here. Zero on this side, total black. And 255 on this side, which of course is total
white. And then any number in between is you know, over here might be 200 and this
might be you know, 85 and so on and so forth. And you can just think of it as a
level of brightness. So if you drag the output of black up to 100, the darkest of any pixel
in the photo can get is 100 in terms of it's darkest possible darkness. If that makes
sense out of a scale of 0 to 255, 100 is the darkest that this image will be allowed to
get for any layer that is, that is beneath the levels adjustment layer here. So a lot
of really interesting stuff and the last thing I just want to show you is if I open
up this image in the camera raw editor, CMD SHIFT + A that would be CTRL SHIFT + A on
the PC. We have a histogram up here in the top corner. You got one of these in
Lightroom. Like I said, they're all over the place. You're going to see them everywhere.
And this is a really intuitive way to play around with your histogram. Cus here
when you hover over any part of the histogram, it tells you, look there's the
exposure, there the highlights, there the whites. And sure enough, the exposure,
shadows and blacks. So we can say look, we want our shadows actually to be a little
darker. So I can drag this toward the left a little. And it's going to make all the
shadows a little darker. It's going to infuse a little more contrast into the photo. We
can say maybe those whites are a little too bright, we want to pull them down a little
bit and we also want to pull the highlights down a little bit and maybe we will overall
pull the exposure down a little bit. That's pretty cool. I can hit ok and it's just a
really intuitive way of working with the histogram and just learning a little bit
more about it. Now just so you know, here in Photoshop, there's a bit you can do with
the histogram panel. The flyout menu you can show on all channels view which will
show you your red, green and blue channels. This is an RGB image. So you'll have a red,
green, blue channel. They all have individual histograms where you can see how the red
is being mapped and the green and blue are being mapped. That will be a whole different
tutorial in terms of getting into how to work with color in individual channels. Probably
something that I should do. You can pull up those channels individual histograms here.
You got your luminosity. Which, don't be fooled, luminosity's going to look a little
bit different than your composite RGB. So make sure you're working with your RGB. And
then you also have colors which I almost never use cus it's just a little bit too much
going on here for me. But sometimes it can be useful especially if you're looking to like
line up the greens and the reds you can just visibly watch as they kind of pull together
as you're playing with color channels. But again, that's a whole different ball game
that I'm not going to get into right here. So you have your expanded and compact view
I almost always work in expanded view. You can show all these statistics. All this junk
down here. You know, okay. Expanded view is what I like to work in. And then the last
thing you can select a part of your photo. So I can like grab the snow out here, and
it will create a histogram for just the pixels within that selection. So I can see,
yup, a lot of brightness with-in that selection whereas if I go over here and
select like the trees on the side of the mountain. Well, noticeably darker and for
good reason cus it's just a lot of dark pixels. Same thing here, if I go with this
side of this tree. A lot of dark stuff where the tree is and then it get's bright cus I
picked up some bits of snow as well. So a lot of really really cool stuff you can do
with the histogram specifically in Photoshop but just understanding what the histogram
is telling you is going to be so incredibly useful and helpful for you in pretty much
every aspect of what you're doing. If you're doing any kind of photo or video, anything.
So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. That is the histogram as you can see very
useful whether you're just in Photoshop or whether you're in Lightroom or the camera
RAW editor or you're doing color grading or you're actually out on a shoot and you see
the histogram on the back of the camera or video camera monitor. Wherever it is, it's
incredibly useful to at least have an idea of what you're looking at when you see that
strange thing we call the histogram pop up there on any screen that you happen to be
looking at. If you enjoyed this video again make sure you subscribe to my YouTube
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You can check it all out. Links are down in the bio for all that stuff and so much more.
Ladies and gentlemen, for checking out the histogram and what it means and the left
and the right, the darks and the mid tones and the brights and everything in between.
That's it! Get it? Got it? Good! Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the
next one.