Too dark or Too light?

One observation about Histograms is that you can truly save a picture.

Real Life

You can tell by looking at a histogram if the photo is correctly exposed by observing the placement. A correctly exposed histogram has features of being placed in the center and looks even, is touching both edges, and is not spiking on both side. You can see that the top three images are too dark and loses details of the image. The histogram shows the spike to be on the left side. The bottom three images are too light and you can see it loses color. I liked playing with the histogram to get a feel on how small and big changes can make a difference.

Exposure Compensation allows you to change the exposure of an image that the camera has chosen from the light meter. As shown above you can see the images on the first row are very dark. The bottom row shows the images to be very light. The middle row shows the images to be in between giving the a real life experience on how you can change the exposure of an image to look darker or lighter.

Histogram is a bar graph that shows the distribution of light. The bar will show you the photographs range of black and white. The left side being black and the right side being white. On the top row you can see that the images are very dark, in the histogram it would show the portion mainly on the left side. On the bottom row you can see that the images are light, corresponding to the histogram being mainly shown on the right side. The middle row will represent the midtones, the image not being too dark or too light. If there is shadows shown in the image it corresponds to the dark tones. If an image has areas that are completely white it will show a highlight in the histogram.

White Balance

Adjusts the colors that are in an image to balance out the color temperture.

Histogram

A graph that shows bars to represent pixels in an image.

Bracketing

Taking multiple photos while adjusting the different camera settings between each shot, to have the same photo but each one looks different.

Exposure Compensation

Allowing images to look darker or lighter.

Underexposed

An image that is too dark, darker than it should be.

Correctly Exposed

An image that is just right, just bright enough and just dark enough.

Overexposed

An image that is too light, brighter than it should be.

Camera

I’ve learned that working with exposure compensation involves all three shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. I’ve experienced that having too much or too little of these three can make your picture completely black or white. The histogram changes based off the exposure of the photo. If The shape of the histogram is clearly spiking to the right and on the edge that means that the image is too bright. If the image is clearly spiking to the right and on the edge that means it is too dark. If the histogram doesn’t reach the left side it is lacking black and if it doesn’t reach the right side it is lacking white.

Photoshop

Within this experience I learned more about histograms and how they can be a bit tricky. I knew that the left side is black and right side is white. When I had to guess what the histogram would looked like for one photo I had assumed it would be in the middle because the background was very light and the subject was dark. I was wrong, there was two spikes, one on the left side and one on the right side. This histogram had a very thin line in the middle with no slope. I noticed that the left side was corresponding to the bridge and how the shadow made it really dark. I also noticed how the right side corresponded to the sky and the light that was coming from the sun.