Fixing Exposures with Histograms

While you can often recover poorly exposed photos in your image editor, your best bet is to arrive at the correct exposure in the camera, minimizing the tweaks that you have to make in post-processing. However, you can’t always judge exposure just by viewing the image on your J1’s LCD after the shot is made. Nor can you get a 100 percent accurately exposed picture by using the J1’s live viewing display. Ambient light may make the LCD difficult to see, and the brightness level you’ve set can affect the appearance of the playback image. Moreover the image you see on the internal EVF may not be 100 percent accurate.

Instead, you can use a histogram, which is a chart displayed on the J1’s LCD that shows the number of tones being captured at each brightness level. You can use the information to provide correction for the next shot you take. The histogram is shown in the Detailed display during picture review, as shown in Figure 5.13. This screen provides a small histogram at the right side that displays the distribution of luminance or brightness.