Histograms 

📚 Buy Our Books on Amazon! 📚 📕Stunning Digital Photography: help.tc/s 📘Lightroom 6 Book: help.tc/l 📙Photoshop Book: help.tc/p 📗Buying Guide: help.tc/b

Tony, you make histograms so chill. You're just a chill dude editing some chill photos with some chill histograms. If there was a chill histogram you'd be all the way to the right. Keep up the chill work, man.

On 9:22 you probably meant 4 times more NOISE, rather than 4 times more IMAGE. :)

6:18 that noise scared the hell out of me haha

I tried searching for a video on your channel a few weeks ago and couldn't find anything like this but now it's here! Really makes more sense now - I'll have to put it to use now, appreciate all the good content you guys put out! :)

Nicely explained Tony! Keep making great content!

How often you can find a pro teaching photography features like this on youtube? Different screen calibrations is never a problem after Tony's explanation of histogram.

Thank you so much for this one! I always knew to use the histogram but I needed to really understand it before being able to use it.

I enjoyed this video. It was explained in a simple easy to learn way. Thanks Tony.

Guys, thank you very much! Your videos are just treasure for a newbie like me. The more I watch the more I understand I was a monkey with camera, and now finally I evolve :)

Thank you for the videos you and Chelsea uploaded, I learned a lot from both of you.

Fantastic!! I'm a beginner & have been trying to grasp the histogram....this was very informative & easy to understand! Thanks you!

Much good information. Where the RGB histogram has advantages over the luminance histogram is where there is a disproportionate amount of one colour. Imagine taking a close-up shot of an orange flower, surrounded by dark green leaves (don't sound like a very exciting shot, but plenty of people take images like that). If you expose to the right using the luminance histogram you may well find that the petals look rather flat and lack contour. Look at the RGB histogram and you will probably see that the red channel is blown and the exposure needs to be reduced to avoid this. Small point but can save your bacon in some circumstances. Otherwise, nicely put.

Histograms are a dark art, but you have just enlightened me. Thank you Chelsea's assistant for exposing me to this tutorial. It's as clear as black and white now. :p

These videos are amazing! So informative and really well thought-out. I love your content and the books you are selling are at such a great price point. It really shows that you're trying to make photography accessible to everyone.

I think some washed out image looks really good and adds a stylistic look or vintage style.

Excellent explanation Tony! Love your content, though I am curious about why you would want to expose to the right- I always thought it was best practice to expose to the left in order to be able to recover highs later in post.

Great Explanation - I didn't know anything about it - Thanks ✌

Very good introduction to histograms. Thank you!

thanks for clarifying histograms, great intro

Great info Tony!! I love your presentation skills as well, very well said!

Very nice. We learned something today. Thank you for sharing.

thank you, finally i got the whole histogram mystery cleared in my head. keep up the good work, greetings from germany.

Thumbs Up! I want more of this type of content. (Sharpening, Tone Curve, etc)

Would have been good to mention perhaps more clearly that a picture with just snow and sky and a white bird should have everything on the right side of the histogram. So no black point or anything even close to it. So one should not force a black point and a white point if the image has all dark/black or bright/white. If you take a picture in a mist, then everything is more or less gray, and there is no black point or white point and the picture should be washed out.

top notch help... thanks got your book too

Very useful. Regardless of how much I think I know about a particular element of photography, I was learn something new about it from your videos :) Although, I was waiting for the part where you talked about live histograms shown on the camera screen and how to react to what they're showing.

excellent information

Thanks for the sharing ❤

Wow, this was revolutionary. Thank you!

Very informative. Thank you.

Unfortunately the histogram can be misleading in very specific situations because it averages out the three primary colours. I got pictures where the histogram was perfect but one colour was blown out completely. Sadly most cameras don't show "RGB" histogram in live view so you need to take the picture first and then check the levels of the primary colours. If one colour is blown out, you can underexpose a bit and retake the picture.

Wow, I just learned so much about the histogram. Thank you so much! The information you give us is priceless and so is SDP book!

Solid explanation on histogram values. Really enjoyed this video. Keep it up, Tony.

Hmmm.... frankly this is the reason I've never submitted a picture to TCLive - I just love dark and moody shots that are not technically perfect, in many cases with a lot of complete black (and there's no point in raising the shadows because there's nothing important to see in there, it'd just ruin the mood). My favorite shots lean heavily to the left, and sometimes when I see similar pictures being submitted I wish you'd just look at them first, not at the histogram. I agree that it's good to know what it's for and how it would technically be perfect, but then you can still decide to do something completely different.

Thanks for the refresher. My new D7200 offers this in the field. Very handy.

i know hitting the left and right clips blacks and whites respectively but what happens if the histogram hits the top anywhere in the plane? i've been searching for the answer but haven't been able to find it anywhere

" That's Chelsea's photo , its good but its a little washed out " . Somebody is sleeping on the couch tonight.

Thank you!

Love your video's man, easy and pleasent to follow and understandable explanations. I will be buying a book of you someday soon :D

But isn't this actually showing the JPEG view if we're looking on the back of our cameras? So would this be helpful?

What if I see different histograms on my camera and computer? The histogram on the camera looks fine, but when I look in PS something is always off. The midgones often go way above the top line, when they were somewhere in the middle on my camera. The most noticable culprit is blue - it tends to go to the underexposed side and that changes a lot the image, giving a bluish tint and darkening it. I'm awfully confused. Is something wrong with my camera?

There are professionals who don't know how to explain the technicalities of photography but you are not one of them. I can't thank you enough for excellent and informative tutorials. I wish you did underwater photography so I could learn more about that area.

Thank you 😊 ..

Man, can anyone help me? What is the best camera body(Nikon/Sony/Canon) for $1000(and why)? I am a enthousiast stills shooter, and ReallY LOVE shooting. I shoot all kinds of stuff, but mostly like astrophotography, landscape and portrait. (But that focussing on the sony a6300, WHOOH) I also can go for the Canon 80D and the Sony a6300, because there is like 30% off here in Belgium. I am really in a struggle( I watched like over 60 hours of all reviews and I am just dead, I cant choose, love mirrorless sony but seems little useability) THANKS for your help!

Tony, I have your book SDP. and watch many of you videos, but all your adjustments are made in either Lightroom or Photoshop. I have neither. But I do have Adobe "Elements 12". Can you do some videos using that?

Man, that first photo is National Geographic quality!

Isnt the histogram for jpag in our camera? Because most of us are shooting for raw:/

He says that color histogram is not very useful. I think it's very useful, because the luminosity histogram is just an overage of the colors and does not tell if some color component is overexposed. It's quite common that especially sunlit faces get overexposed in the red color, sky in blue, and vegetation in green. Overexposed areas are flat and post-processing is impossible. Another issue is with the recommendation that you should shoot bright, because there's less noise in the upper part. This is true in the sense that while CCD or CMOS cells themselves are mostly linear, the signal-to-noise ratio is better in the bright end. In JPEG images, you also have less noise in the bright end, because they are flattened out in the logarithmic scale. However, logarithmic flattening and packing into 8 bits also loses much of the linear information, which is why it's better to either shoot raw or underexpose. Further, shooting in raw does not always save from the problem, because the CCD and CMOS cells have an internal _antiblooming_ feature, which makes images nonlinear in the brighter end and hence you lose information.

Hi, Tony. Love your videos and tutorials. I'm looking for a little more hands on training with DSLR photography and Lightroom editing. I'm in Columbia, SC. Do you have any recommendations? Thank you for any guidance you can offer.

I would love to have a live view overlay histogram showing in the viewfinder,

This was helpful, but it seems like it is a guideline and not a rule for all shots. For instance, I was not able to have it "shoot to the right" on some hummingbird pictures I recently took. If I did, the white on his neck was completely blown out (even though it wasn't touching the far right) - making the picture look really bad in my opinion. If I shifted the histogram more to the left, so that there was a bigger gap between the edge of the histogram and the far right side (which you said would be underexposed) - the neck was no longer overexposed, which got all the detail back on the neck. The rest of the bird mostly looked sharp and detailed as well. Although on some of the black feathers on the edge of the wing did loose some detail. So a worse looking histogram, made the better looking picture in this case.

I've been to Peru probably 6 times but is been over 12 years since being to Machu Picchu :( Need to go back I can't even find my original (6MP) images!

So it’s like an eq for audio but for an image instead? Low end is on the left, high end is on the right, and you can adjust each “pitch” to add more “black” or “white”. An image needs dynamics, just like an audio track.

Camera LCD screens offer a terrible rendition of the actual image. They are mostly useful for histograms and text displays. This is especially true when shooting RAW.

One quick question. So when I take a shot should over or under expose?

Thanks for this video but you didn't explained what is the histogram and specifically how this can be read. It feels I need to understand completely from scratch.

I use the histogram all the time if I'm shooting in bright conditions, or else take a test image and dial in any required compensation after checking it. Whichever method I use, the histogram is at the heart of it.....

Thanks and I was aware of the histogram but didn't use it much. And yes I have been fooled by looking at the screen on my camera so let's ad this tip to my bag of tricks. On a separate note our big screen TV has RU-vid built in great.... but I do not see a like button or way to add coments so I jump back to the phone... any suggestions.

Great vid. I suggest you put a one-dollar foam windscreen on the mic, will cut down sibilance.

Why is highlights cleaner than shadows?

since raw i stopped caring much. even my Highlightswarning is wrong and i easily get it all back in raw. i heard phaseone bases its warnings upon the raw. why cant all manufacturers do that? useful to just stay within syncspeed for example.

What about in black and white?

I am from Dubai. I want your Stunning Digital Photography ECOPY. is it available?. And How I will get your 14 hour video. Is it possible to download? How I can Buy it?

Cool video... what does it mean when a luminance histogram is 'flat'; as in little vertical (Y axis) development across the board?

i always shoot to the left because with my Nikon i can always recover the shadows 10x better than i can recover highlights.

Thanks Tony, you're video explanations are always great.

I really wish that you'd show an image of a bride in a white dress beside the groom wearing a black tux in the bright sun with fill flash, or in the shade and the histogram, and dealing with the potential white blowouts.

I'm so glad you made this video I've been waiting for you to do this one

Thank You

Can you put on screen what you address, is this STP or FTP

I am fan of you Mr. Tony, i have learnt alot from your videos and still learning. Thanks alot for your efforts also thanks to Ms. Cheksea 😊

Tony, have you mentioned when the "hills" cropped on the top of the histogram? What does that mean?

I don’t know if you’ll answer but I was told to shoot underexposed is better then over since blown out can’t be fixed

For b&w photography, does the histogram need to be used differently, especially if the lcd is set for b&w display? I only use raw files. Thanks

Do you have a video on how you calibrate your monitor or apply color profiles along your picture workflow?

Is there a way In Lightroom to show only the luminosity in the histogram, like Tony showed in this video in Photoshop?

If you learned how to take your photo correctly in the first place there would be no need for all the tinkering around with your photo on your laptop

“Histogram..A lot of people dont get it”....would bet that lot includes 95% including me...thanks for video :)))

I shoot in RAW, my *camera* histogram gives me a graphical representation of the *JPEG* and not the RAW information. What sort of witchcraft is that, I want my RAW histogram. :D

Thanks. Your usual in-depth excellent coverage. You did present some precise/ideas I hadn't yet dealt with. Good stuff!

Can't we intentionally edit washed out image? It gives good moody vibe to the image

Tony & Chelsea, really enjoy all your videos there so helpful and interesting! Was just wondering how can I send in a couple of photos for you to review on one of them videos you do photos of 2016? Iv got about 3 photos that I would really love you to have a look at 2 that iv taken on my 1100D and 1 on my new 7D both using the same 50mm F1.8 and edited in Lightroom.. Keep giving us these videos all the best for 2017 from Giles in UK London

is it okay that i always seem to prefer my photos slightly underexposed ?

Hi Tony and Chelsea, Great channel and by far one of the best among the photographers! Keep up the good work! Said that, do you know if the Nikon D610 has a histogram in live view? I can't really find info about that on the net...

Thanks Tony 😊 ... this is the single most important post you've done (to me). I actually picked up skill that I never bothered with and it is awesome. I tried what you discussed and played with some images that I thought were throw aways, and fixed them; some with stunning results 🤔. Big props 👏 Alvin

This was very much needed, thank you! :)

Well explained Tony! altough I sometimes prefere washing out the black tones, I think it gives a more relaxed feel to an image.

2:15 Is that the famous Machu Picchu Llama you guys talked about?! The one Chelsea said was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity???

Hi Tony, Hope you receive this message well, I would like to ask you about the computer that you use in your presentations, please correct if I'm wrong but, looks like that you do not use a Mac and I would like to know the computer specifications, because when you are using Photoshop and Lightroom the transition and image changes occurs very smoothly and in a very nice performance, because I'm planning to buy a new computer to use in my pós-production if you can give me these information, would help a lot. Thanks

Hi, Tony . First congratulations for all your hard work is very helpfull. ofcourse I am your follower in all plataform. I am very new on this world of photography. My question: Using a Canon mirrorles M50 in manual mode when I read the histogram some time is overxpose or under. I use the shutter speed or aperture until I see the histogram in my camera display right. Even when is fine on the display I can see on the exposure bar maybe one stop over or under. I took the picture and looks great. My question is when the histogram is fixed it doesnt matter the exposure display bar in my camera. Sorry maybe is a silly question, but you are the master

how are you bringing those images in to the develop module, are those DNG images?

can you get the luminosity histogram as opposed to colour in lightroom?

Primary Colors are Red, Yellow, and Blue (not Green)

Hey, thanks for the good content. Do you happen to have a video about organizing old photos? I inherited a massive dataset of old family photos (digital and scans of old developed photographs) with duplicates and different formats and file sizes. I have a hard time to sort them since I don't know where to start. I really would appreciate if you could recommend some software or make a vid about this. Thx.

When is the exposure meter useful when you have histogram?

Thanks Chelsea and Tony... following all your videos with a lot of attention and trying to repeat your tips and tricks.. Hug from Portugal

Chelsea - you rock, I love that young alpaca/llama?

Hi! Your videos are awesome. Thanks so much! In Lightroom when I look at the histogram....if the triangle on the right is white, that means something is blown out. Sometimes when I bring down the highlights a bit, the white triangle disappears and I've gotten rid of the blown out area (?), but then the triangle turns to a color...like red, blue or yellow. What does this mean and is it a good or bad thing?

Tony, slightly off topic, but could update your "My Camera Gear" , Thanks.