Digital Home Thoughts: Understanding Photograph Histograms

"Histograms are a topic that we could (and probably should) spend a lot of time talking about but let me give you a very brief answer to get you through in the short term. Histograms are a very useful tool that many cameras offer their users to help them get a quick summary of the tonal range present in any given image. It graphs the tones in your image from black (on the left) to white (on the right). The higher the graph at any given point the more pixels of that tone that are present in an image. So a histogram with lots of dark pixels will be skewed to the left and one with lots of lighter tones will be skewed to the right."



I remember that I had seen a histogram of an image for the first time in Photoshop and had learned so much about them when playing around with the settings there. It is worth reading about details on a histogram for two reasons - 1) it will help you digitally edit your images better and 2) help you take better pictures with cameras that give you image histograms at picture capture time.