What is a Perfect Histogram?

Do you refer to the Histogram in your digital camera or editing softwares such as Photoshop or Lightroom to examine the exposure?

Understanding the role of the Histogram in digital photography is a must as it can help you in creating the perfect exposure. Due to its significance, I dedicate a good part of our Digital Camera Boot Camp Workshop to teach Histogram and if a perfect Histogram exists!

Generally speaking the Histogram shows you the tonality of light captured in an image. In this article I am going to talk about the Luminosity Histogram not the RGB Histogram. By understanding the information in the histogram you can easily modify the exposure to make a perfect shot.

Here is a very basic shape of a black and white block. So the perfect histogram shows two spikes, one for black and one for White.

Now lets add a grey tone block to the image and explore the Histogram

These are very basic images with basic histograms. Now let’s make it a little complicated by adding a gradient black to the white tone:

And here is the Histogram for a Radial black to white gradient

The application is the same. In Luminosity, your camera or editing software sees the colours as different shades of grey. Here is a sample of different colours:

As you can see in this image, the Histogram shows how pixels were used in the image. It helps me to get information regarding the brightness of the image.

For this simple reason, to me all the histograms are “Perfect Histogram” provided how you interpret the data.

That is all for now. Stay tuned for next article about Histogram, in which I will discuss how to interpret the Histogram data according to the image, and you will find the real Perfect Histogram.

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Ted and the Omnilargess Team