Do You Really Need to Read Your Histogram?

SCOTT KELBY

This may be the most shocking thing you read in this book: not only do I not use the histogram on the back of the camera, but most of the pros I know don’t either. With digital photography, our main concern is keeping detail in the highlight areas of our photo (so the brightest parts of our photo don’t get so bright that there’s nothing there but solid white), so instead of trying to evaluate the histogram, we just turn on our camera’s highlight warning. It warns us if any part of our image is clipping (losing highlight detail), so then we can use exposure compensation to override the exposure our camera chose, and darken the exposure a bit until the detail comes back. That warning is telling us that the right side of the histogram is hitting the right wall of the graph (known as the “right wall of death” by...well...me). Anyway, here’s why the highlight warning is better: the histogram only tells me if some part of the photo is hitting that right wall, it doesn’t tell me if what’s hitting the wall is something I care about, whereas the highlight warning shows me, right on the LCD monitor, exactly what part of my image is clipping, so I can quickly see if it’s an area of important detail (like a white shirt) or something that doesn’t have detail (like the sun. In the example shown above, you can see by all the black in the sky that these areas are clipping). So, if you’re spending a lot of time worrying about your histogram, or worse yet, worrying that you don’t know what the histogram even is, now you can get a good night’s sleep. Note: Some people get really fanatical about technical stuff like histograms, so I just want to clarify this: I’m not telling you not to use your histogram, I’m just telling you that I don’t use it. (Wink, wink.)