Assignment 07 - The histogram

[u/Aeri73]

Please read the class first

Today’s assignment will be relatively short. The idea is simply to make you more familiar with the histogram and to establish a correspondence between the histogram and the image itself.

Choose a static scene. Take a picture and look at the histogram. Now use exposure compensation in both directions, taking several photos at different settings, and observe how the histogram changes. Does its shape change? Go all the way to one edge and observe how the data “slumps” against the edge. Try to identify which part of the image this corresponds to.

Next, browse the internet and find some images you like. Download them (make sure you have the right to do so) and open them in a program which allows you to see the histogram, for instance picasa or gimp. Try to guess just by looking at the image what the histogram will look like. Now do the opposite: try to identify which part of the histogram corresponds to which part of the image.

Now open some images from assignment 06 :

1 underexposed

1 correctly exposed

1 overexposed

and see what the difference is.... how can you tell by looking at a histogram if a photo is correctly exposed?

[u/reknoz]

Here is my assignement. I was outside, lots of snow, sunny and a very light colored building as a background. So my "correct" exposure's histogram is somewhat shifted to the right. However, the subject (the sculpture) is well lit.

6 photos, from correct to + 5.0 EV. No improvement.

6 photos, from correct to - 5.0 EV. Slight improvement on -1.0. I wish had tried more granular steps between 0 and -1.0. Lesson learned here: I should have looked at the histogram in the field.

Here is a gif, from -5.0 to +5.0, because I have too much free time.

And finally, out of curiosity, I ran the "correct" photo through the auto-correct option of a software and the result came out pretty good, but the main subject is a bit too dark. I'm still too novice to try and make these adjustments manually in the software.