Caught just before lifting off, amazingly close to the FDR drive.

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What is a Histogram?

A histogram is a graph that displays how light is distributed in your picture. The left side of the graph represents the shadows, while the highlights are on the right.

That means that if the histogram has a high peak on the left, you can tell that a lot of pixels in the picture are dark, or in shadow. A peak on the right of the graph means that a lot of pixels are bright, or in highlights. Peaks in the middle of the graph represent pixels in the midtones of your exposure.
 

The Histogram of a Good Photo

Right, now let’s look at some examples of histograms. Refer to the picture below. On both the left side and the right side of the graph, you can see that there are no high peaks. This kind of histogram tells you that no part of the scene is over or underexposed. In other words, this shot should look good.
 

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The histogram of a good photo
 

The Histogram of an Underexposed Photo

Ok, now let’s look at the histogram of an underexposed photo. You can see a spike in the shadows that starts with a peak on the left of the graph. That means that the picture has lost data in the shadows. There’s also just a few pixels trailing off the right side of the graph, so a tiny bit of data might have been lost there as well.
 

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The histogram of a underexposed photo
 

The Histogram of an Overexposed Photo

You can probably guess how an overexposed photo looks. Here you can see a pronounced spike on the right side of the graph. Do note that the height of the peaks is somewhat low in this picture; that’s not an indication of under or overexposure. All you need to worry about is whether they breach the left or right edges of the histogram.
 

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The histogram of a overexposed photo
 

Conclusion

Well, I hope this article has given you some insight into how the histogram function of your camera works. When composing your photo, always try to avoid the histogram from spiking at either extreme end of the graph, where you’ll lose data and have under- or overexposed parts of your picture.

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