HISTOGRAMS Explained. How to use them when you edit your WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY images.

Hello! It is Danielle again and welcome to the Pangolin Chobe Hotel in Kasane.

I am working on some Lightroom edits and I am sitting in one of our hotel rooms.

You can see there's ample space for yourcomputer, your camera and charging ports.

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everything happening here in the room, soa great space for photographers to do their thing.

Today, we'll be talking about the histogram.

What it is and how you interpret it.

Before I continue.

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please remember to subscribe to our channel, and hit the bell icon at thebottom, to get notifications about our next video.

So, as you can see on my screen here, Ihave the image that I took yesterday on the river.

You can then see the histogram on theright hand side in the develop panel.

A histogram is basically a graphicaldisplay of tonal values of an image.

It shows you how many pixels are atwhich area of the image.

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meaning on the left-hand side of the histogram, you see it says blacks – over there at the bottom.

Then it says shadows.

Exposure in themiddle.

Highlights and then whites.

This represents all the lights and darks that are present in the image.

A darker image would have a graph sittingmore on the left-hand side, and a lighter image would have a graph sitting more onthe right-hand side.

The mid-tones are represented in the middle.

What you can see here is an RGB histogram, which means that it represents your primary colours.

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your red, your green and your blue.

Wherever those colours overlap, youhave your yellow, your cyan and your magenta.

Wherever the graph is grey – onthe right-hand side – it means all colours are represented.

So, where two of the three primary colours overlap, you will have magenta, cyan oryellow.

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and then the rest are your primary colours of red, green and blue.

Soit looks complicated in the beginning, but it just shows you how many pixelsthey are in the lighter areas, and how many pixels are represented in the darker areas.

On this histogram, as you can see with the Fish Eagle on the side of the river – on the river bank – The Fish Eagle has a few darkspots in his feathers, so some of his body is dark, and then his head and hisneck is light and white.

So those lights represented in the Fish Eagle's head, would be on the right hand side of the graph, and the darker areas would beon the left, near the shadows.

A very small number of pixels that are represented on the dark side, becausemost of the image is very light.

Yesterday, when I took this shot, I sawthat the Fish Eagle's head was giving me 'blinkies' .

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you can refer to the 'blinkies' video about what they are in our playlists.

But basically it showed that the neck and the head of the fish eagle was flashing black and white on my screen, and that you don't really want, because that means that you're losing detail.

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asI say on my video.

So you can see that the 'blinkies' are basically arepresentation of the histogram.

It's a shortcut.

If you see it on the back ofyour LCD screen on your camera blinking you know that on the histogram you'regonna have a lot of tones on the right-hand side of your histogram.

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AND what we call clipping happens.

So, as you can see on this histogram, there's a blue arrow lighting up on the right, so that alerts you that your highlights areclipping, which means your highlights are touching the right-hand side of thehistogram.

This is not something you want.

You want the graph to be away from thesides (mostly).

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because as soon as it touches either left side, or rightside, and it gives you that little triangle alert that lights up.

It meansthat you're losing detail.

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either on the right-hand side on the highlights, or onthe left-hand side you're losing detail on the black areas.

You do want to tryand not do that when you shoot.

It is slightly recoverable – to a certain degree – but on the way right, if it clips, it means you have lost detail in the highest highlights, or the brightesthighlights, if I can say it that way.

So, you can take the histogram and try and drag it down slightly to the left.

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and you will see that the arrow disappears.

If I drag it to the right, it lights up again.

If I drag it to the left, it goesdark.

So you can do that, to a certain extent.

If your lights are blown out – yourhighlights are blown out too much – then you will see it never pulls away from the right-hand side.

What you should have done in camera, as I explained on my previous video, and you can go and check it out, is you shouldunder-expose then slightly.

So, as soon as you see 'blinkies' on the camera screen (on the LCD screen), you know that it's over exposing, meaning you know it's clippingon your histogram, and you know that those highlights won't contain anydetails.

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and you do want details in his feathers, for example, and on his neck.

So what you do in camera, is you would under-expose, making your picture slightly darker.

So what I can do to show you is this was the other image that I took, and I under-exposed slightly yesterday.

So, if you look at the histogram, you will see that nothing touches on the left, so the detail and the dark spots are maintained/retained, and the details in the highlights are also retained.

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and that isa much better image, because you cannot recover blown-out highlights.

You canstill recover shadows to a certain extent, depending on how much noise popsup in your image, but you can check that out on another tutorial.

That's the histogram explained.

If you want to move around any area, you can either do it in Lightroom – in the basic panel – so you can move your exposurearound, or as you see there, it shows you those are the shadows you click, youdrag and you lighten-up the shadows.

So, you can either use your sliders in yourpanels, or you can use your histogram and actually grab and drag your histogramalong.

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and see what effect that has on the highlights and the shadows of your image.

Just remember, don't clip on the right, don't clip on the left.

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and then you should be okay with retaining details in all the shadows and the highlights.

I hope that explains it.

Check out our other videos that explain other concepts in Lightroom.

Thanks for watching.

If you have any comments, please leave them in the comment section below, and we will answer any questions that you have.

Until next time.

Bye bye!.