CREATE MUCH BETTER IMAGES EASILY BY USING A HISTOGRAM.

A histogram is a graphical representation of the tonal values of your image. Meaning, it shows the amount of tones of particular brightness found in your photograph. Histograms are useful tools that cameras provides to help you get the correct exposure on your images. A histogram is also a graphical representation of the pixels exposed in the image. The left side of the graph represents the blacks or shadows, the right side represents the highlights or bright areas and the middle section is mid-tones. We can tell an image is well exposed if it reaches fully from edge to edge without a space on one side of the graph, and isn’t heavily going up one side or the other. Vertical axis of a histogram displays the amount of tones of that particular lightness. Histogram is exposure-dependent, but is also affected by tone curve and other settings.If a certain portion of the histogram is “touching” either edge, it will indicate loss of detail, also called clipping. Highlight clipping (areas that are completely white and absent detail) occurs if the graph is touching the right side of histogram. Shadow clipping (areas that are completely black and absent detail) occurs if the graph is touching the left side of histogram. Either case can be often fixed by altering exposure settings. However, you must remember that it all depends on the scene. The histograms can also tell you if the exposure of your photo is overexposed or underexposed and the gaps on either end on the graph indicate you are missing information and your exposure can be shifted safely without losing detail. When your graph is shifted too far in one direction or the other so that it does not even touch the other edge – that means you can safely shift your exposure to cover more of the range of tones.

In conclusion, photographers can use histograms to determine how to simply correct the exposures and even though using this technique won't make a photographer a professional, using histograms can really help figure out corrections towards images that might be too exposed or not even exposed at all.